Three days after Diana Nyad’s “successful” 2013 Cuba-to-Florida attempt, lead kayaker Don McCumber (as @Woodkayaker) wrote on the Marathon Swimmers Forum that he had video of “water breaks, feeding breaks, medical breaks, the application of anti-jellyfish creams, and the donning of the ZERO FLOTATION suit and mask” (archived).
Little of that footage materialized. These creenshots from McCumber’s 2011 video suggest why he might have withheld it:
We also have that clip from 2012 showing Nyad holding onto the boat:
Finally, we have an image showing doctors holding Nyad up, likely during one of her 2011 attempts:
One of Nyad’s crew members told me that
there was lots of touching the swimmer, holding, swimmer touching the boat and lines. She uses a different definition of “marathon swim” than most people do. . . . She also used a very strict definition of “unassisted” — her definition meant that she didn’t use a shark cage.
Why does any of this matter? Marathon swimming often depends on the honor system. An athlete as dishonorable and attention-hungry as Diana Nyad can easily take advantage of that. She claims to follow “the fair and accepted rules of the sport,” breaks most if not all of them, then self-declares world records.
Nyad’s adoring public and her media enablers cheer.
The truth is what got Diana Nyad through her record swim from Cuba to Florida in 2013
(Sally Jenkins, The Right Call, p. 91)
Another Lie In Find A Way
I like to pretend that I’ve found all the lies in Nyad’s memoir, so I’ve been kicking myself for missing one that came with flashing lights and a siren.
In 1974, Nyad attempted to complete the first Lake Ontario two-way crossing. After swimming the 32 miles from Toronto to Port Dalhousie (in the town of St. Catharines), she covered about 3½ miles of the return before ostensibly passing out.
Nyad writes in Find a Way that she was then taken “to a Toronto hospital” (p. 61), a claim I didn’t question until I came across a speech she gave in July at the Scentsy Family Reunion. Nyad combines the story of her first professional race — it often begins, “I found myself standing on the shore of Lake Ontario” — with her two-way attempt:
I found myself standing on the shore of Lake Ontario. The lake was cold that day. It took me 18 hours and 22 minutes to reach the other shore, and I was taken to the University of Toronto Hospital emergency room. (28:09)
Changing “a Toronto hospital” to “the University of Toronto hospital” accords with Nyad’s inflationary tendencies — next thing you know, she’ll be on a helicopter to the Mayo Clinic. But it’s not a big deal.
This is bigger: Going to any Toronto hospital would have required motoring about 30 miles back across the lake rather than seeking attention closer to Port Dalhousie.
I checked contemporaneous accounts and found this in The Toronto Star: “Miss Nyad was taken by ambulance to St. Catharines General Hospital.” In 1974, St. Catharines General would have been on Queenston Street, about a ten-minute drive from the turnaround. Even faster with flashing lights and a siren.
The hospital lie is one of many Nyad told at the Scentsy Family Reunion, which was not an actual family reunion but a convention for a multi-level marketing company that sells wickless candles and other scented products. Nyad mixed a couple of selling-related paragraphs into her presentation but dispensed roughly the same lie-bloated speech she’s been giving for the last ten years.
However, she graced her audience with two new untruths.
New Lie #1: Qualify For The Trials Today, Swim Them Tomorrow
Nyad tells her Olympic Trials story but leaves out her usual electronic scoreboard lie. She makes up for the loss by adding a new bit of nonsense:
I’m either going on this night to the elite Olympic trials the next day, or I’m going on to the rest of my life.
You can’t qualify for the Olympic Trials the day before they start.
To compete for a place on the 2024 Olympic team, U.S. swimmers had to meet Trials qualifying times at least five days before the meet. A Swimming World magazine ad suggests that in 1968, the last opportunity to qualify would have been August 18, six days before the Trials began in Los Angeles on August 24.
However, Nyad’s last chance came and went much earlier, at the Region 4 AAU Championships, July 19–22. According to the Fort Lauderdale News and Sun-Sentinel, that would be “the last time many of the area and state swimmers [could] qualify for the AAU Nationals . . . and the Olympic Trials.”
Nyad qualified for neither, nor did she place in any of the meet’s events. On the plus side, she got her picture in the paper.
New Lie #2: Most Mt. Everests The Pure Way
Nyad namedrops, then gives credit where credit’s not due:
Ed Viesturs is a friend of mine. He’s climbed Mount Everest more than any human being the pure way, without bottled oxygen.
Viesturs is a phenomenal mountaineer. He was the 5th person to climb all 14 of the world’s eight-thousanders — mountains rising 8000 meters or more — without supplemental oxygen. He summitted Everest that way twice. But he’d probably be the first to tell you that the climber who summited Everest without supplemental oxygen more than any human being is Ang Rita Sherpa, aka “Snow Leopard.” He did it ten times.
Speaking of High
Nyad loves to tell audiences about her crew’s dedication to Diana Nyad:
They took time from their families, their own jobs. I poured the Kool-Aid, they drank the Kool-Aid, and we were all high on the same Kool-Aid.
(Scentsy Family Reunion, 54:13)
In other words, Nyad knows she can say whatever she wants, and her crew, fans, and media enablers will guzzle it without question.
(Nyad has talked before about her crew dispensing Kool-Aid. As best I can tell, she always does it without irony. Some in the Scentsy audience laughed, but Diana remained straight-faced, maybe surprised that they found her Kool-Aid allusions funny or discomfiting.)
Even Higher (Education): Diana Gets Into Harvard
Nyad once said she held the Yale sit-up record, but she never attended Yale.
Nyad told the Village Voice she went to Berkeley, but she didn’t go there either.
However, she really did get into Harvard. She arrived aboard a worksheet from Professor Oliver Knill’s Spring 2024 Calculus class:
Problem 1): Diana Nyad allegedly in 2013 became the first person to swim the 110-miles from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage. . . . There is an interesting data riddle involved in the case of Nyad’s swim. Nyad released GPS data about her 53-hour swim. Here’s a very small sample of the data:
Time (hours) 0 5 7 15 31 32 40 Distance (miles) 0 6.67 8.90 18.72 54.85 58.72 82.88 Find Nyad’s average speed between 5 and 7 hours into her swim. Also find her average speed between 31 and 32 hours into her swim? Why might these numbers have raised suspicion?
The original version of Professor Knill’s Nyad problem didn’t include “allegedly.” He kindly added it after receiving an email from a concerned citizen.