Diana Nyad returned to Manhattan on Saturday for the New Yorker Festival’s Fearless!: Life on the Edge. The panel — arranged by a highly respected magazine, occurring on the island of Nyad’s most obvious lie, and consisting of three genuine adventurers and one fraud — provided an indicator of the success of Nyad’s deceit. On stage, she told untruths she had parroted in other venues, giving no hint she’d been deceiving people for decades. Few in the audience knew they had the honor of listening to one of sports’ greatest liars.
A Facebook pal mentioned that, given the difficulty of proving Nyad’s Cuba-Florida hoax to the general public, we need to catch her in an obvious untruth. But we already have: the Manhattan Island lie. However, her Manhattan first is not her grandest lie (that would be Cuba-to-Florida, 2013) nor her most cruel (that would be her slander of Walter Poenisch) nor her most comical (that would be the jellyfish fabrications). But it’s her most greedy and transparent.
Nyad knows she was not the first woman to swim around Manhattan Island. Yet, over and over again, she claims she is. When she lies on camera a year after admitting that she was not the first, she tosses it off without a hint of deception:
How can anyone lie that well? Well, it’s what con artists do. They’re professional liars.
Most of us believe that we’ll know when someone is lying, but con artists lie too well for us to tell. We believe that a liar will always betray at least a hint of shame, but con artists don’t feel shame. We believe that no one can look us in the eye and lie that convincingly. But it’s second nature to Diana Nyad.
Moreover, the Manhattan lie betrays Nyad’s selfishness and greed. She has no qualms about ignoring other great swimmers while talking only about herself.
Six trail-blazing but relatively unknown women preceded Nyad around Manhattan Island: Ida Elionsky, Mille Gade, Lottie Schoemmell, Lillian Garrick, Anne Priller Benoit, and Diane Struble. Nyad could use her fame to educate the public about these pioneering athletes. Instead, she pretends they don’t exist.
Which brings us to Cuba-Florida, version 2013. Nyad groomed the public, in part using the Manhattan lie, for her coup de grâce. Maria Konnikova explains the process in her book, The Confidence Game:
The good confidence man has been working his way up to this very moment, the moment when ‘too good to be true’ turns into ‘actually makes perfect sense….’ (p. 172)
In 2013, the public bought Diana’s grandest lie and its accompanying delusions: anything is possible if you just put your mind to it; age doesn’t matter; Diana Nyad is epic and you’re not! etc.
As of today, folks have held on to their investment for over four years. They’ve added funds by paying to hear Nyad speak, buying her book, watching her nephew’s documentary, and taking long walks. The public will not easily relinquish its stake.
For example, after I informed a Nyad-admiring blogger about the character of his object of admiration, we had a brief electronic conversation. It ended this way:
Dan, I appreciate your enthusiasm for the truth, but your obvious hatred of Nyad is simply unappealing…. I simply have no room for negative energy in my life. I choose to focus on the positive.
Which, [sic] is what I did in choosing the story of Nyad. It’s not the person that mattered, it was the inspiration of the story. I will not try to convince you further of this and I invite my readers to follow my lead on this. I will not give more energy to the negativity.
I wish you happiness and peace.
I don’t hate Diana Nyad. I hate what she does. “The person” matters, especially if that person lies, cheats, discredits some swimmers, tramples the memory of others, and generally dishonors the sport I love.
In the end, Fearless! was the perfect place for Diana Nyad. Having told such blatant and outrageous lies for so long, she’d have to be fearless to take the stage with the likes of Alex Honnold, Roberta Mancino, and Philippe Petit. That’s why Nyad told the same tales, almost word for word, that she tells over and over in other venues. God only knows what she might say if she went off script.
Let’s end with something upbeat: a photo of some ocean swimmers experiencing the great joy of being in the sea.
I wish you all happiness, peace, and dolphins.
