Diana Nyad can’t tell the truth. She gets away with her constant fabrications because of her grandest fabrication: She has convinced most of the press and public that she’s not a serial liar. Few think to question her, even when her fabrications become absurd.
How Low Can She Go?
I think since I’ve been five years old, I’ve been in what you might call training. You know, I’m just, I’m always in a fairly intense gauge of moving. (31:45)
Nyad told Sports Illustrated in 1971 that she started training when she was 12. That number soon dropped to 11, then 10, 9, 8, and 7. For Shegerian, Nyad skipped 6 and went straight to 5. I suspect Nyad might say that she’s using an expansive definition of “training”: riding her bike, swinging on monkey bars, running around at the beach. Whatever the definition, she has never mentioned “training” at five. There’s only one place this can end.
Above: A compilation of clips showing the various ages at which Diana Nyad claims to have begun training. See also this PDF summary of her age-of-onset assertions.
Nyad presented Shegerian with plenty more misinformation and lies. Here are two of my favorites:
Pinged By A Predator?
So you know, without that [shark] team, I’m out there, a sitting duck. . . An innocent swimmer comes by, John, making a little low-frequency vibration on the surface, that shark with its sonar, its ampullae, from two miles away senses wounded, dying fish, and they’re under us in a hurry. Sharks can hear prey from over a mile away, maybe two. (18:18)
Sharks don’t have sonar or any other sort of echolocation. The ampullae of Lorenzini work only within a few inches of potential prey. And an “innocent” swimmer? If she’s talking about herself, I don’t think so.
Climbing Everest Adds Years To Your Age
As you know, a 90-year-old man has climbed Mount Everest, and then we could meet people your age who are already feeble and given up, and half energy’s gone [sic]. (27:19)
The oldest person to climb Mt. Everest, Japanese mountaineer Yūichirō Miura, summited in 2013. He was 80.
So what’s the big deal if Diana adds ten years to Miura’s life, or gives sharks mad sonar skills, or makes herself five instead of twelve when she started training? No big deal when considered separately. But taken together with all her other lies, both the ridiculous ones and the ones that matter — like being the first woman to swim around Manhattan, taking 6th place in the Olympic Trials, or swimming from Cuba to Florida under her own power — it’s a really big deal. For Diana, the truth will always be inadequate.
Never to Denigrate: The Concessive Pivot
The concessive pivot is a rhetorical device in which you concede a point about someone or something, then pivot and smash the concessees to bits. At least that’s the way Nyad uses it.
I have a lot of respect for anybody who’s out there doing marathon swims, but I would do [training] swims that nobody — a lot of marathon swimmers in their entire careers — don’t do. (14:00)
Nyad often tees up the concession as above, by saying something respectful about other swimmers. Then she attacks by saying how much more accomplished and tenacious she is than the first guys (though those guys are almost always gals). The maneuver allows Nyad to boast while she hides behind a scrim of mutual respect and objectivity.
Here’s her most recent concessive pivot, one that doesn’t involve other swimmers:
I whole heartedly [sic] appreciate the rules of [the] sport but it is unfair to criticize me for never having been issued rules that were not in place at the time of my swim. (Facebook, 2 Oct 2026, scroll up)
In other words, “I appreciate the rules, but fu*k the rules. And nothing’s my fault.”
In a 2017 interview on the Platypus Institute’s Neuronfire podcast, Nyad delivered her multiple-pivot masterpiece:
Well, you know, never to denigrate any of the great swimmers — male, female, young, strong — who have tried this, what we call the Mount Everest of the Earth’s oceans. Of course, they are people with fortitude. But why did none of them come back a second time?
You know, the two greatest distance swimmers on the planet today, along with me, are two Australian women. There happened to be three women at the top rung of the ladder of our sport. Penny Palfrey, awesome swimmer, has conquered most of the great oceans of the planet. Younger than her, Chloë McCardel, strong and fast. I bow down in front of the two of them. Once they got, you know, halfway, a quarter of the way, stung by the box jellyfish, turned back by the confusing, enigmatic, counterclockwise eddies within the Gulf Stream, impossible to see even with space telemetry. They stated before that swim that this was their dream, that this was the Mount Everest of the Earth’s oceans, more than any other swim in the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, down under Australia. This was the one they wanted. They never came back. (5:47 — clip)
Comparing Nyad’s marathon swimming accomplishments to Palfrey’s and McCardel’s is like comparing James Frey’s literary output to William Faulkner’s, or Elizabeth Holmes’s scientific discoveries to Marie Curie’s. But Nyad has spent over half a century training the press and public never to question her false equivalences, numerical fabulations, and whirlpools of bullshit. So they rarely do.
Never, ever, ever to denigrate, though.
