In August, Diana spoke with Dr. Merav Opher, professor of Astronomy at Boston University and director of the SHIELD NASA DRIVE Center.
The SHIELD Center is an international collaboration of researchers studying the heliosphere, a solar-wind-generated bubble surrounding the solar system. Nyad appeared as part of the SHIELD Center’s webinar series. They called her presentation:
“The Human Spirit Can Make the ‘Impossible’ Possible:
What Space Exploration Can Learn About Passion, Perseverance, and Resilience from a Groundbreaking Athlete.”
I would have called it something else. Nyad lied throughout. Let’s start with some new ones.
The Fantastic Five
I don’t have my own children. I’m a pretty good aunt and grauntie, and I have five stepchildren. I’ve been very involved in their lives. (40:10)
Diana has bestowed upon herself several distance records, a doctorate, a ratification, a glowing review in The New York Times, and many other imaginary accomplishments. We can now add five stepchildren.
She may have a godchild or two, but reality has never been enough for Diana.
The Girl With The Ishin-Denshin Tattoo
“I got to give a speech in Stockholm in 2014,” Nyad begins this tale. She’s there with her best friend, Bonnie Stoll. Their visit coincides with the Nobel Prize ceremony (53:08).
At her hotel, she meets
the man who won for biology that year. He had just proven that, after 30 years of studying with teams, not just himself, . . . that humans do not have a circadian rhythm. (53:20)
The man — Nyad doesn’t name him during the interview — won the entire million-dollar prize. After the Swedish government took its 40%, he used the balance “to bring all the scientists that he worked with for 30 years over to Stockholm.”
Since they weren’t invited to the ceremony, he organized a “black tie evening for them with a chamber orchestra.” And he thanked all of them, just like she thanked her own team “two hours from shore, exhausted” after having swum “for 53 hours.” (Her crossing lasted 52. She stopped and thanked her team at about 50, looking far too fresh for having swum that long.)
Above: Bonnie demonstrates Ishin-Denshin in a clip from her Book Passage appearance on December 16, 2023. Watch Bonnie’s facial gesture after Diana says her biopic received “a 10-minute applause.” Ishin-Denshin (以心伝心) is the Japanese concept of unspoken mutual understanding, as in “I know you’re a serial liar, but I’ll never tell.” Nyad and Stoll have identical Ishin-Denshin tattoos.
“Oh my God, I got moved,” says Dr. Opher, pointing to a tear (55:14).
She’d been defeated by Diana’s superpower: Telling heartwarming, nonsense-filled stories with the confidence and shamelessness of a seasoned grifter.
Nyad was with Bonnie in Stockholm once. The truth ends there.
- They visited Stockholm in 2017 (not 2014).
- That year, a team of three men — Nyad never mentions the other two — received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. There’s no Nobel for biology.
- Those three researchers — Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael W. Young — won “for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm,” which exist in “almost every cell in our bodies.” In other words, they showed the opposite of what Nyad says they showed.
- Nyad did run into Professor Hall at the hotel. She names him on Facebook and says they had coffee. It looks more like she buttonholed him at the bar.
- Hall didn’t get the entire million-dollar prize. He split it three ways with Rosbash and Young.
You can watch the 2017 Nobel Prize Ceremony on YouTube. I cued the video to the Physiology or Medicine presentation. If you back it up, you’ll hear soprano Camilla Tilling singing an aria from a Bach cantata. A chamber music-sized subset of The Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra accompanies Tilling. Their magnificent music makes it obvious why Nyad chose a chamber orchestra for Professor Hall’s imaginary black-tie party.
Hall left scientific research a decade before he received his Nobel. In an Associated Press interview, he described how he’d use his prize money:
I’m retired with dwindling coffers. I’ve already lasted longer than I intended. This will keep me going until I’m dead. (1:41)
Accent On “Who Says That?”
[Celine Dion] does French with a Quebecoise accent, which is just wrong. (25:01)
Maybe Diana was trying to be funny — like when she insults other swimmers’ looks or celebrates their failures.
Two Old Standbys
So, that’s honestly, that swim was more than just an athletic event. [I] set a new record. (13:11)
Nyad’s “record” was self-declared. No governing organization sanctioned, ratified or approved her crossing. No governing body proclaimed her swim an official mark.
Guinness World Records (GWR) previously listed her as the “First person to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage or fins.” But it’s not a marathon swimming governing organization, and it later removed the listing. (archived | current).
We still don’t know what Nyad did in the Florida Straits in 2013. Much of the available evidence suggests that what she didn’t do was Swim from Cuba to Florida under her own power.
. . .
I was nine years old. I was a little competitive pool swimmer, and she said to me — she was French — she looked across that horizon. I said, where is it, mom? I know Cuba is out there. I can’t see it. Where is it? She said, okay, it is right there. [It] is just across the horizon, just right here. As a matter of fact, it’s so close you, you little champion swimmer. You, you could almost swim there. (20:20)
Nyad didn’t begin swimming competitively until age 12. She won her first state high school championship in 1964 at age 14. She won a second and final championship in 1967.
Nyad began lying about her pool swimming career by 1971. She has said, among other things, that she won six championships and became the best backstroker in Florida. Neither is true.
She didn’t start telling her Cuba discovery tale until about 2014. Before that, she described stumbling on the swim in other ways, like finding it on a chart or a map or learning about it from her dodgy manager/publicist, Chuck Jones. At the same time he worked for Nyad, Jones also represented Walter Poenisch, who began planning a Cuba–Florida swim ten years before Diana’s first attempt.
And her mother wasn’t French.
. . .
“I’m gonna set my own limitations,” Nyad told an interviewer in 2021. “Who’s gonna tell me I can’t — I can’t do this, that, this, that. And on the other hand, I’ve had many things in my life: a PhD. . . .”
Nyad never earned a PhD or any other degree beyond the the BA she got from Lake Forest College in 1973. She spent the following academic year in graduate school but left to focus on swimming. The truth must feel like a prison to Diana. Her imagination lets her escape.*
*Four months after Nyad met Hall in Stockholm, an interviewer asked Diana for her thoughts on truth-telling. Among her responses (lightly edited for readability):
- Interviews: “I have definitely come to a position as a journalist or someone — if I’m giving an interview — of telling the absolute truth.”
- On stage and in Find a Way: “When I’m on stage and when I wrote the memoir, I can vouch that every word is true.” (See my analysis of Find a Way.)
- Find a Way: “When I’m talking about records or facts as they happened if people need to know them, and now I’m a minor public figure, but something [of] a public figure. Like that memoir, it’s some 400-some pages, I swear by every single word, every paragraph in that book. It all happened exactly the way it happened.”
- Who cares?: “I certainly am very careful as to the stories I tell. And Bonnie, if we’re at a dinner party, and I’ve told the story, she’ll go, ‘Well, it didn’t happen exactly like that.’ And I say, ‘Who cares? That story isn’t for history. And there’s nobody here recording it. And you know, and it’s not a self-aggrandizing story, like, I achieved this.'”
The following two short compilations contain clips of her truth-telling responses: “Diana Nyad’s Absolute Truth” (Nyad’s replies with counter-examples) and “Diana Nyad On The Truth” (Nyad’s responses only).
Kool-Aid
Fundraising gets to be complicated because you have to be, you know, sort of aware of who’s got that kind of discretionary money and who’s going to drink the Kool-Aid that you’re pouring. (28:42)
. . .
People have told me, “Whatever Kool-Aid she’s drinking, I want it. I want to drink it myself. And I want to sell it to my people because it’s inspiring.” (29:52)
Nyad’s pushing Kool-Aid hard these days. I was surprised by how readily the SHIELD researchers drank, though I probably shouldn’t have been. Why would they question her fabrications? The media and public have swallowed over 50 years of Nyad’s lies while mostly ignoring far greater athletes, people like Sarah Thomas, Lynne Cox, Grace Van Der Byl, Penny Dean, Caroline Block, Vicki Keith, and Pat Gallant-Charette, who have spent their careers swimming with authenticity, tenacity, and integrity.
Then there’s Chloë McCardel, whose Florida Straits failure Nyad celebrated. In October 2021, McCardel completed her 44th English Channel crossing. That’s more than anyone in history and 44 more than Diana.
The summer Nyad turned 27, she attempted to swim the English Channel — Earth’s iconic marathon swim — three times and didn’t get across once. She never returned. Nyad later claimed that “the only sort of world-class swim I had tried and failed at back in my twenties was going from Cuba to Florida.”
She also said that in the 1970s — during her twenties — she became
the best ocean swimmer in the world. I held all the major records on planet Earth, out in the open sea.
She never attempted another major solo ocean swim* after her 1976 English Channel failures. Two years earlier, she had won the Capri-Naples race in Italy in record time. That would be the only major ocean record she set during her career.
*I define a major solo ocean swim of the 1970s as an event of over ten miles that saw at least ten successes through 1979. See “Nyad at the Ebell, part 1: The Best on Planet Earth.”
Diana Nyad was never a groundbreaking athlete. She hasn’t achieved the impossible. She has used her drive for self-aggrandizement, her instinct for self-promotion, and her disregard for the truth to convince the public that a mediocre athlete is one of the greatest marathon swimmers in history.
NOTES
Quittin’ Time
I didn’t address all of Nyad’s SHIELD Webinar fabrications. For instance, she says that no one ever quit her team. Yet, in Find a Way, Nyad writes that her 2012 Operations Chief, Mark Sollinger, burned out and left before the 2013 attempt: “As far as the Cuba Swim goes, Mark is done” (p. 234).
It’s impossible to know how many other people came and went, but there had to be more. I always wonder about Jon Costenbader. Nyad listed him as a shark diver in a since-deleted blog post. Roger McVeigh, one of Nyad’s two observers, listed him in a pre-swim roster.
However, McVeigh may have copied his list from an out-of-date source. Costenbader appears not to have crewed the 2013 crossing. He may have been busy. Federal agents arrested him on October 6, 2013, just over a month after Nyad completed her crossing, after he sailed a yacht carrying about 620 pounds of cocaine into West Palm Beach. He was released from prison this July.
Then there were the team members Nyad called traitors and fired for helping other swimmers. No one else in the sport requires fealty from their crew.
Sharks Have Sonar, But Only In The Dianasphere
Diana told Dr. Opher that
dangerous sharks 50 to 60 miles offshore may not have eaten for a week. And if a low-frequency vibration on the surface, of a swimmer coming by, they — from two miles away — they hear with their sonar, they hear [a] dying fish.
And they are under us in a hurry. And they would think nothing of coming up and taking a leg from me. (56:43)
Sharks have many ways to detect prey, but sonar isn’t one of them. Maybe they raced to get under Diana because they were sick of Nyad using them as one more entry in her trauma catalog.
Or maybe they wanted a taste of that tattoo.
Sharks don’t need Diana adding to their undeservedly negative press. Over 330 people died in traffic collisions last year in Los Angeles, Diana’s hometown. About the same number died from homicides.
Two people in the entire country died last year from shark attacks.
More than half of the L.A. traffic deaths were pedestrians struck by vehicles. Diana’s in far greater danger walking or driving in Los Angeles than she ever was swimming in the Florida Straits.
(H/t AM for putting shark sonar on my radar.)
Correction, 2 Jun 2025: Fixed date and link for Book Passage appearance with Nyad and Stoll.