Some excerpts from Helen Dudar’s “Diana Nyad’s Magnificent Obsession.”
Cover of New Times magazine, June 26, 1978.
I had been itching to get my hands on this article for months. The L.A. Central Library has New Times on microfilm, so I finally gritted my teeth and struck off down the 10. Turned out to be worth it just for the dune buggies. [Update: I can’t believe that I forgot to include the most egregious, self-serving, and grandiose bit. See the Gertrude Ederle quote below.]
After years of writing and talking about herself, Diana Nyad misplaces three decades.
On a recent episode of the “Wild Ideas Worth Living” podcast, host Shelby Stanger asked Diana Nyad about her expulsion from Emory University, an incident that Nyad has recounted numerous times. Surprisingly, she claimed that she had little memory of her teens, twenties, or thirties. She concluded, “…I don’t remember Emory at all.” Below are some excerpts from Nyad’s remarks. (For the full passage, please see “Diana Nyad on her memory.”)
Countless articles and websites hawk variations of “Back in the 1970s, DIANA NYAD was the greatest long-distance swimmer in the world” (LiveTalks LA ). You can find other iterations broadcast widely online and in print: TED, Woman Fails in Attempt…, Nyad’s website, etc.
We can follow this fiction back to two sources: Diana Nyad and her publicists. To paraphrase the great swim coach Doc Counsilman in “Go For the Gold, Doc,” Nyad was a mediocre swimmer who conned the public into thinking she was a great one.
Nyad adds to the monumental epic-ness of her Cuba-to-Florida “swim” by claiming that she hadn’t swum a stroke in 30 years. But she swam at least 2237 strokes in the 1996 Alcatraz Sharkfest.
The New York Times Opinion section’s Facebook Live event with Diana Nyad on Friday left plenty to talk about. I’d expect nothing less from a storyteller of Nyad’s caliber.
Update, 29 June 2019: Last August, the NY Times quietly issued a “correction” to a critical paragraph of the op-ed. Nyad’s detailed description of the time, date, and location of the first episode of alleged abuse (see previous post) now reads, “That summer, on the day of a swim meet, I went over to Coach’s house for a nap.”
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Diana Nyad’s conversation with Alicia Wittmeyer of the New York Times is the most disturbing thing I’ve heard from her. That’s saying a lot given the quantity of Nyad material that I’ve listened to in the last few years. The smugness, the fluidity of truth, the Trumpian rhetoric—it’s all there. But now she’s using her own alleged abuse to latch on to others’ horror to satisfy her own needs.
Nyad’s recent piece in The New York Times contains multiple inaccuracies that cast a shadow over the validity of her allegations.
Update, 7 Sep 2019: Integrated new evidence from “New Evidence….” Edited post for readability.
Update, 29 June 2019: Last August, the NY Times quietly issued a “correction” to a critical paragraph of Nyad’s piece. The time and location of the initial episode of alleged abuse, originally the state championships at her school (Pine Crest), became just “a swim meet.” The Times left all of Nyad’s other fabrications intact.
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All quotes come from Nyad’s article unless otherwise noted.
1. 1964 — Location of the Meet
"That summer, our school hosted the state championships. It was a big deal, and I was a star in the middle of it all. In between the afternoon preliminaries and the night finals, bursting with confidence, I went over to Coach’s house for a nap." (Archived at Internet Wayback Machine and at Later On.)
Nyad’s school, Pine Crest, did not hold the state championships that summer, so Nyad could not have napped at her coach’s house. Pine Crest was in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In 1964, the state meet took place in Gainesville, over 300 miles away.
Pine Crest could not have hosted a state meet or a championship of any kind in 1964. The school had only a four-lane 20-yard pool and no diving well.
I was in graduate school for Comparative Literature at NYU in 1975 and when I came back to school in the fall, after a summer on the world marathon swimming circuit, such as the annual swim across the Bay of Naples, from Capri to Naples, Italy...
Nyad may or may not have gone to NYU,* but she did swim the Capri-Naples race in the summer of ’75. It would be her last time: she finished fourth of seven women, 14th overall—not the best evidence for her “greatest long-distance swimmer in the world” claim (see “The Best of the ’70s”).
The first of three entries examining Diana Nyad’s bizarre response to being caught in her Manhattan lie.
In 2011, CNN caught Diana Nyad lying about being the first woman to swim around Manhattan Island. In response, Nyad did not apologize for — nor even acknowledge — her deception. Instead, she posted a blog entry full of excuses, justifications, irrelevant information, and more lies. Continue reading “Diana’s GREAT Surprise, part 1”
Nyad’s “Fearless!” performance contained much of her usual crowd-pleasing poppycock, but she hit the mother lode with her original take on protective headgear.
Tom Terrific and his non-titanium thinking cap.
As per my previous post, Diana Nyad appeared on the New Yorker Festival’s Fearless!: Life on the Edgepanel on Saturday, October 7. Except for her religious conversion (see below), I heard nothing new…with one important exception: Ms. Nyad’s “Titanium Cap of Will.”
