Diana Nyad’s performance on the afternoon of September 2, 2013, convinced most of the media and public that she swam under her own power all the way from Cuba to Florida. An endless stream of lies, a shipload of evidence, and a swimmer protesting way too much suggest that she did not.

 

Above: Nyad’s crew chief and best friend Bonnie Stoll holds her arm during the crossing. After the crossing, Nyad maintained that she never “touched a boat or another person.” Holding a swimmer like this would lead to immediate disqualification in any legitimate marathon swim. Image by Dawn L. Blomgren.

You only need to know four things about Diana Nyad’s crossing from Cuba to Florida:

1. From almost the moment she walked ashore, she began lying about the crossing. She never stopped.
2. Her observers and other crew members documented the crossing so poorly that it remains unratified. The odds that any governing organization will ever ratify it or declare it an official record are almost zero.
3. Most experienced marathon swimmers know that Diana Nyad is a serial liar.
4. A handful of experienced marathon swimmers support and enable Nyad. The two most influential — World Open Water Swimming Association founder Steven Munatones and Marathon Swimming Federation co-founder Evan Morrison — have compromised themselves and betrayed the sport by supporting its most egregious fraud.

 

I can’t keep track of all the lies Nyad tells about the crossing. What follows is a sample. I’ve left out some of the absurd untruths that don’t bear on whether or not she completed the swim under her own power, like her counting stories and her jellyfish tales. If I included every lie she told about the crossing, this page would never end.

Contents

1. Lies from before the swim

2. Lies from during the swim

3. Lies from after the swim

4. Trust

1. Lies From Before the Swim

 

Rules: “I’m confident we’ll be reasonable.”

You cannot undertake a legitimate sporting event — especially one for which you intend to claim a record — without rules. Nyad’s crossing had none. Without rules, we can’t know what she did.

Nyad began lying about the rules the day after she walked ashore. In her press conference, Nyad said, “It was very important that no one touch me, ’cause you’re disqualified” (press conference, 28:30; transcript). Yet she’d been touched throughout her crossing.

We’re real careful about the rules. (Tavis Smiley, 16 Sep 2013)

We did not break one rule . . . Trust me, this dream [is] too important to me to have any slight thing outside the fair, just, ethical and agreed-upon rules of our sport. Every attempt I’ve made has been by the rule books. And now this successful crossing was done in [the] same fashion. (Facebook, 6 Sep 2013, archived, via Marathon Swimmers Forum)

After the swim, Nyad declared that a goes-without-saying subset of the rules was all the rules. “The rules of the sport,” she wrote in her 2015 memoir, Find A Way, “are such that you may not receive any aid at any time, in either moving forward or in staying afloat” (p. 72). That’s like saying that the rules of running are such that you can’t wear roller skates and a jet pack. Or the rules of chess are such that, while waiting for your opponent to move, you can’t practice your trumpet. They go without saying, but Nyad says them because, in a sport as invisible to the general public as marathon swimming, her rules can pass as authentic.

You’ll often hear her repeat her fabricated “rules of the sport.” Nyad knows that, if she repeats a lie often enough, she’ll create an illusion of truth, particularly among those unfamiliar with marathon swimming. And that’s just about everyone.

The rules of the sport forbid any aid in either moving forward or keeping afloat. (Find a Way, 199)

[There was] never any levity [sic], never any buoying up. I was in the water for 52 hours and 53 minutes without ever any assistance in keeping above the water or moving forward. (Reuters, 11 Sep 2013)

In a 2019 letter to Brent Rutemiller, then-director of the International Swimming Hall of Fame (ISHOF), Nyad added a legal threat to her rule manipulation:

Were we to, for instance, go to court with this, the truth of my swimming every stroke from Havana to Key West, every minute of the 52 hours, 54 minutes, unaided, never a moment’s help in either staying afloat or in moving forward, would be proven quickly and unequivocally.

Nyad also began claiming shortly after the crossing that she followed “Florida Straits Rules,” the creation of Steven Munatones. An experienced swimmer, observer, and administrator, Munatones is also Nyad’s strongest supporter and enabler in the marathon swimming community. He said he would make his “Florida Straits Rules” public. We’re still waiting.

In marathon swimming, English Channel rules — a.k.a. traditional rules — prevail unless a swimmer or a governing body specifies otherwise before a swim. And Diana Nyad did not. English Channel rules constitute “the fair, just, ethical and agreed-upon rules of our sport.” Briefly, they are:

• No Artificial Aids beyond a swimsuit, cap, goggles, nose clip, earplugs, and grease.
• No physical contact between the swimmer by any other person.
• The observers time the swim and watch for compliance with the rules.
• The swimmer must swim from shore to shore, starting and ending on dry land.

 

Nyad knows these rules as well as anybody. “A legal marathon,” she said in 1975, “may be undertaken only in a regular racing suit, cap, goggles, and grease — no flotation devices, no insulating suit.”

Yet, she broke almost every English Channel rule during her crossing. And without predetermined rules, her observers could hardly watch for compliance. How could they when Nyad set no rules other than the “no touching” directive everyone ignored?

Above: No touching! At the end of the crossing, Roger McVeigh and Janet Hinkle (circled heads) protect Diana from unwelcome physical contact. Nyad also used McVeigh and Hinkle as figurative human shields against accusations that her swim wasn’t legal.

 

Aside from “no touching,“ Nyad never mentions actual English Channel rules. “You can see I have a [jellyfish] suit, I have surgeon’s gloves, I got booties—all legal,” she told Oprah a month after the swim. “You’re not allowed to wear neoprene.”

 

Touching

Most marathon swimmers hold the No Touching rule sacred. That’s why Nyad and her crew claimed at first that she wasn’t touched:

I never of course touched a boat or another person. (Facebook, archived)

Discussed landing protocol and need for her to exit water without being touched, according to email received from Steve [Munatones]. (Roger McVeigh, observer report)

Nobody can touch her until she’s out of the water! (Bonnie Stoll, The Other Shore)

It was very important that no one touch me ’cause you’re disqualified. After ALL that, somebody comes up and hugs you and says, “Great job.” DONE! (press conference, 28:30; transcript)

In the last three citations, Nyad, Stoll, and McVeigh are talking about the end of the crossing. But the timing doesn’t matter, at least in a legitimate marathon swim. The finish was a charade performed for the media and the public: “I was touched,” she later told CNN. “I agree with it.”

Nyad did her best to downplay or ignore all her other breaches of marathon swimming rules and norms:

None of us would sully our reputation and our name on this record by doing anything untoward, anything that would be adverse to the basic rules of never having any kind of aid for flotation and never having any kind of unnatural aid for forward movement. (Conference call, 10 Sep 2013, clip)

The swim-tech company Finis will make me a custom stinger suit, this in accordance with the rules of marathon swimming. No neoprene or any fabric with either flotation or warming properties allowed.” (Find A Way, p. 199)

You can see I have a [jellyfish] suit, I have surgeon’s gloves, I got booties — all legal. You’re not allowed to wear neoprene.” (Oprah)

“All legal” according to only one person I know of: Diana Nyad.

 

Suiting Up

Nyad told Time magazine in its 2023 whitewash of her career and her biopic that she put on the stinger suit by herself with only a little help from crew members:

After much effort in pulling that stinger suit over wet skin by myself, I could not get the final inch of zipping it at the back of the neck. A shark diver would come around the back and pull the zipper up. He did not hold me afloat to do the zipping.

The World Open Water Swimming Association (WOWSA) uncovered hundreds of images from Nyad’s crossing when they investigated it in 2022. Not one image shows her putting on or taking off her stinger suit by herself. Many show her getting help.

Despite all of her transgressions, she demanded that her crossing be designated “unassisted”:

I don’t want the record if they’re going to call it assisted because that’s the equivalent of fins or shark cage,” Nyad said. “I would like it to be official for posterity’s sake, and I’ve already received apologies from swimmers about the quibbling and maliciousness of this debate, and I’m confident we’ll be reasonable.  (Miami Herald, 18 Sep 2013)

No marathon-swimming galaxy exists where all Nyad’s gear and all the touching would be allowed for an unassisted swim, i.e., one done according to traditional marathon-swimming rules. Not to mention that she should’ve figured out ahead of time who’d do the allowing. Normally, you’d arrange with a governing body to oversee the swim beforehand. Nyad may have assumed Munatones would immediately ratify the swim. That didn’t happen. Years later, she sent her shoddy documentation to some of “the auspices of the sport and different record keepers.” Finding an organization willing to ratify her swim as “assisted,” much less “unassisted,” has proven impossible.

 

Observers

Nyad prided herself on enlisting for her team elite practitioners in every field. Yet for observers, the crew members who would attest to her crossing’s legitimacy, she recruited two acquaintances who had no training or experience.

Here are examples of Nyad’s comments about her observers:

The two independent observers (Roger McVeigh and Janet Hinkle) took detailed notes every minute of the crossing. (email to then-head of WOWSA Steven Munatones, 4 Sep 2013, via WOWSA report).

They took copious, accurate notes. (Press conference at 41:55 | transcript)  

You are allowed to ratify a swim by having even your husband or your best friend or your son or your daughter be the actual observer who takes very specific long notes for every minute and can say at the end, “never did she touch the boat, get out on a boat, hang on to a kayak, use flippers.” You know, all the things that would make a swim legal. Town Hall Seattle Q & A, 9 Nov 2013. Transcript here)

[I had] two completely independent observers who split the hours, one of them at a time always eyes on me at close range, taking notes, submitting their logs to account for every single minute. (Letter to Brent Rutemiller, 31 Jan 2019)

They agreed to be absolute hawks and split shifts to make sure that one of them had their eyeballs on me every minute. (ESPN The Magazine, 23 Dec 2013)

I posted all the data evidence online, along with the minute-by-minute logs from the two independent observers. And then I locked those GPS trackers in a bank vault. (Find A Way, p. 278)

 

In the end, their amateurish logs contained multiple hours-long gaps, making it impossible to prove that she completed the swim under her own power.

Above: Chart comparing time between observer entries during two swims: Diana Nyad’s Cuba–Florida crossing and Sarah Thomas’s 67-hour 2017 Lake Champlain swim. With few exceptions, Thomas’s observers made entries every 30 minutes. Nyad’s made irregular entries and left lengthy gaps.

 

Nyad dropped Hinkle and McVeigh into a hopeless situation. Marathon swim observers have two fundamental responsibilities: Document the crossing and ensure the swimmer follows the rules. Hinkle and McVeigh didn’t know how to do the former; and, without rules, it was impossible to do the latter. Nyad used Hinkle and McVeigh as props. She could point at them later and and and say she had two independent observers who watched her like “absolute hawks.”

Nyad had initially lined up Steven Munatones to be her sole observer for the planned 60-plus hours of swimming. Why just one observer for a swim that would require at least two? Because Munatones was the only experienced observer whom Nyad could trust to look the other way.

According to a crew member who worked with Munatones on an earlier Cuba–Florida attempt, Munatones told Nyad:

She should do whatever she needed to do to complete the swim and the swim would be ratified or not based on how it was conducted.

In 2012, Nyad grabbed and pushed off Voyager, clear grounds for disqualification under any set of marathon swimming rules. A legitimate observer would have stopped the swim right there. Munatones did not. He may have noted the episode in his observer’s log. But in a obfuscation tour de force, he refused to make the log public. We only know about the incident because someone caught it on video.

Given the possibilities of a swim based on English Channel rules versus one based on “whatever she needed to do,” you can see why Nyad wanted Munatones.

 

Diana’s “Big World Record”

The inadequate record-keeping makes it impossible to prove that Nyad completed the swim, much less set a world record. But Nyad and her crew claim she set one anyway:

[Talking to Tavis Smiley about her decision to try again after three decades] I’m gonna go back and do that Cuba swim that no one’s ever done since 1950 . . . It’s a 100-mile stretch, which for an open ocean swimmer is a long, long way. It’s a big world record. (17 Sep 2013; clip|complete interview)

Let’s take me at 64. [I] made a world record swimming from Cuba to Florida. (Generation Bold, 18 Nov 2018; clip|complete interview)

[McVeigh:] Our job as observers was to watch to ensure that she complied with the endurance swimming rules to secure the world record (no touch or assistance along the way). (bodyzen, 16 Sep 2013)

 

Nyad set no record. No governing body ever declared Nyad’s crossing a world record. They’d need to ratify it first, and there’s no way to prove she completed the swim under her own power. Any Cuba–Florida record Nyad set is entirely self-declared. In fact, Nyad has never set an officially recognized distance record. If you run into her Bimini “world distance record” — either 89 or 102 miles for a 60-mile current-assisted swim — you’ve encountered a Woozle, a myth that has become true because everyone says it is.

Above: Detail from an Evan Morrison blog post. “In my opinion,” he writes, “the distance records claimed over the years, e.g., Martin Strel’s river swims and Diana Nyad’s Bimini-to-Florida swim, are almost meaningless.” The current online version of this post is hard to read. I’ve archived a more legible earlier version here.

 

For more on records in marathon swimming, see the International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame’s “World & Other Records,” which states: “It is always bad practice when a swimmer announces their own swims/records.”

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2. Lies From During the Swim

 

Breaks: “You can stop for three minutes.”

Nyad says she limits the length of her feeding breaks to about three minutes so she won’t get dragged too far east:

So, you stop very quick. And you’ve got a Gulf Stream, and it’s going that way, east, and you’re going north. So, anytime you stop, you’re getting dragged east, east, east. (New Yorker Festival, 2017)

So you can stop anytime you want. You can stop for three minutes, you can stretch out your back, move your shoulders around, take a look at the sky, take down your drink as slowly as you want. (American Osteopathic Association, 2020)

Every time I stopped for that little sip of fuel for three minutes, get myself together, I’m being dragged due east, and this whole swim is about north, north, north, north, north. (SafetyCulture Global Summit, 2021)

But according to the logs, Nyad’s average stop lasted about 14 minutes — longer if we factor in the storm. No one likely ever completed a legitimate swim by spending as much time not swimming as Diana Nyad. Also, she continued on her beeline toward Key West during her lengthy stops. Her GPS data shows no significant eastward movement at any time during her crossing.

Above: Screenshot of a spreadsheet detailing the 14 breaks for which Janet Hinkle and Roger McVeigh logged durations. Please see the “Take a Break” spreadsheet for the version with active links.

 

 

Though the GPS data shows little eastward movement, the logs show Nyad veering right:

 

Shift 5 (McVeigh):
9 pm shift has started
Very easy for Diana to drift away from boat, kayakers have a tough job keeping her close to Voyager

Mon. 1:37 am (Hinkle)
Diana is always veering right, away from the boat and many voices direct her back to the light and the boat. More confusion than I’ve witnessed before. Everyone constantly bidding her to swim toward the red rope light and nearer the boat.

Mon. 4:45 am (Hinkle)
Lots of encouragement from kayakers trying to keep her on course. “Go left Diana, swim to the light.”

For some reason, she swims to the right and she must return to the boat on her left to stay on course.

Fleet Captain John Duke added after the crossing:

Diana’s course towards the end of the swim became a constant battle to keep her directed towards Smathers Beach in Key West. She would slowly veer clockwise.

That’s what you’d expect if a boat headed north was towing her through a current headed east.

 

The Longest Break

Nyad claims that she treaded water while waiting out an approximately 90-minute storm on the second night. During the storm, she maintained he same speed and direction as she had for at least two hours before the storm and one hour after.

With the storm bearing down on Nyad’s flotilla at about 10:45 p.m., Duke invoked “storm protocol”: The five-boat flotilla spread out and positioned itself downwind of Nyad to avoid accidental collisions. The shark divers stayed with her until the weather passed (Find a Way, p. 211).

Neither observer logged a word between 10:45 p.m. and the end of the storm, around 1:37 a.m. During the storm, the observers couldn’t see the swimmer, only “a small circle of red lights” in the distance (McVeigh, shift 9). In the interview with Tavis Smiley, Nyad said she treaded water the whole time:

SMILEY: You treaded water for an hour and twenty minutes?
NYAD: Yeah, and I was hanging on. 

Nyad’s navigator, John Bartlett, wrote in his log that she swam and rested:

Too much wind to control streamer for Diana. She stayed in and swam surrounded by divers. She did breaststroke to keep warm, and rested.

A member of Nyad’s shark team told a different story. He told crew member Lois Ann Porter that Nyad swam so fast they couldn’t keep up with her. Nyad’s GPS data supports the shark diver’s version: The data shows Nyad speeding straight for Key West throughout the storm.

In a separate report, Ben Shepardson — likely the shark diver Porter mentions — wrote:

Even with my longfins it was hard to keep up with her [Nyad] for long distances and once you got behind her it was quite difficult to catch up. (“A Shark Diver Story,” archived)

Shepardson and Nyad shared the same current. With his fins, Shepardson shouldn’t have had trouble matching Nyad’s speed — unless she was getting help.

Two marathon swims from below. Above left: Mike Tyson showing how it’s supposed to look (while crossing Kyrgyzstan’s Lake Issyk Kul, by permission of the swimmer). Above right: Nyad’s Cuba–Florida crossing (via Ben Shepardson’s “A Shark Diver Story”). Nyad or another swimmer could have been attached to Voyager in a way that most of her crew couldn’t perceive. See “Attachment Disorder 3: Well-Connected” for my hypothesis.

 

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The Final Nine Hours

Nyad’s observers all but ignored her during the crossing’s last nine hours. WOWSA collated the observer and navigator logs into a single combined log. It shows that, except for one stroke count during hour 50, no entry addressed Nyad’s condition from hour 44 to the end of the crossing in hour 53.

Above: Expansion on WOWSA’s combined log for the crossing’s last nine hours. The image includes everything Hinkle, McVeigh, and Bartlett logged during that time. The media material, missing from transcribed versions of the logs, is crucial for two reasons: It shows that Nyad and her crew members prioritized media over observations, and it has no place in the official logs of the swim.

 

At 10:40 a.m. — in the middle of those nine hours — Nyad gives her first speech of the day. She gathers her team around her to thank them. This happens during Roger McVeigh’s final observer shift, but he doesn’t log it.

Thankfully, two other crew members, kayakers Katie Leigh and Don McCumber, posted footage of it. (Both links go to archived versions. Nyad-related data tends to disappear.) In a recent interview, Nyad said she got choked up during the speech. She doesn’t sound choked up. Nor does she sound like someone who had just spent almost 50 hours steeping in the Florida Strait.

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The End

When Diana Nyad arrived at Smathers Beach, she neither looked nor acted like someone who had just swum for 52 hours straight.

Below are videos of the ends of three swims. First is Nyad’s Cuba–Florida finish. After that, two people finishing legitimate crossings.

In Nyad’s, note how she removes her goggles and cap before she leaves the water. She wants to look sharp for the media. Her hair appears dry. She glances right, presumably at a camera. Her crew members work to ensure that no one touches her before she reaches dry land, as if she hadn’t already been touched hundreds of times. She knows the rule. With the cameras on, she finally follows it.

In the clips below, 48-year-old Australian Penny Palfrey and 37-year-old American Sarah Thomas had just swum 40 and 54 hours, respectively. Both are phenomenal athletes, but neither could likely have given a coherent speech two hours earlier. Neither was concerned about how they looked or what they’d say after they left the water. Neither thought about removing a cap or a pair of goggles to spiff up for the cameras. Both had the same objective in what remained of their minds: reach dry land, sit down, don’t move another inch.

 

Above: Penny Palfrey in 2011, finishing the first Little Cayman to Grand Cayman swim in 40 hours, 41 minutes. This swim was a warm-water crossing like Nyad’s. Palfrey spent two days in the hospital recovering. (See “Penny Palfrey’s record swim.”)

Below: Sarah Thomas in 2019 finishing a four-way English Channel crossing in 54 hours, 10 minutes. (See “Sarah Thomas Completes Historic Four-Way. . . .”)

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3. Lies From After the Swim

 

Vanishing Video

Most of the video from Nyad’s endeavor disappeared within a few months of her crossing.

Above: Screenshots of Diana Nyad’s YouTube channel. How it looked on September 2, 2013 (left), and April 25, 2014 (right). Via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

 

She later added some videos to her page. But by September 2020, it was blank again. A few months earlier, she had told an interviewer, “I’ve got a million series of videos on YouTube.” (2020.05.23.re:invention-virtual-chat, 39:17). Unfortunately, I didn’t hear that interview until months later, so I can’t say for certain how many videos she had at the time.

By March 2023, her page had 28 clips. That’s how many it has today, on the twelfth anniversary of her Cuba–Florida crossing. Why so little video from the endeavor? In a Facebook reply on the fourth anniversary of the crossing, Evan Morrison wrote (and later deleted):

 

She and her team probably worried that skeptics might find something incriminating, like they had for the attempts in 2011 (touching the boat and a crew member holding her up — see image below) and 2012 (grabbing and pushing off the boat) attempts.

Above: Screenshot details from video of Nyad’s 2012 attempt taken by kayaker John McCumber. The 2012 video of Nyad touching the boat disappeared too quickly that I didn’t catch the filmer’s name.

 

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The Call

 

Nyad’s finish left many experienced marathon swimmers skeptical. So Steven Munatones gathered 14 marathon swimming luminaries for a conference call a week later. The call lasted about 3½ hours. The idea was that Nyad and Bartlett would answer questions, alleviate the conferees’ skepticism, then welcome them and their marathon swimming brethren into the fold of Nyad believers.

Nyad lied a lot about the call afterwards. Some of those lies were inane and pointless:

John Bartlett got on a phone call with them for 13 hours.

We got on a big, all-night telephone call.

Others were more self-serving:

And [the call participants], 98% of them, were very kind and said, “she swam fair and square, shore to shore.” (Politics & Prose, 45:22)

They all said to me or wrote to me or John Bartlett, my navigator: “Thank you. Thank you for taking the time. You know, fair enough, it’s done . . . And the couple that are still out there — haters are always gonna hate, and they’re still there. (Blue Sky Innovation)

NYAD: I got many apology and respectful notes from that group of swimmers when it was over to say, “Please forgive us for doubting, but we needed to ask these questions. It’s over, congratulations, it’s history.” 
OPRAH: Wow.
NYAD: Yeah, so, I had to suffer through it, but I guess I had to. (Oprah)

[Bartlett’s] empirical proof of our course satisfied all but a couple of what they call online ‘haters.’  (Find A Way, p. 278)

Save one individual, all the people on that call declared afterwards that the navigation of the swim was understood and that Diana in fact swam shore to shore, fair and square. (Letter to Brent Rutemiller ostensibly written by Bonnie Stoll but clearly a Nyad product)

I attempted to contact all 14 participants. Of the 10 who responded,

• none had contacted Nyad afterwards to apologize and/or offer congratulations.
• none were satisfied that Nyad and Bartlett verified the crossing.
• six said outright that Nyad and Bartlett hadn’t proven anything.
• one said: “I am willing to swear that much of what she claims to have said or to have happened on the call or to have later provided are lies.”

During the call, a participant’s question about her observers’ qualifications got her angry:

I didn’t get any emails from any of you from Marathon swimming, or from the people I have known — [former observers] Mike or Steve or Lexi — to say, “You know what, if you do this thing, if you finally ever do it, you should really have someone from the Obama administration on board. (clip)

Later on, Nyad had complained that

We’ve been assaulted from every different direction. So, it’s not that we’ve been holding things back . . . We’ll make all of these logs available to you and the world immediately. (clip)

She didn’t make the original logs available until nine years later.

During the call, John Bartlett, Nyad’s “genius navigator,” explained his strategy for using the Gulf Stream to boost Nyad’s speed. Bartlett claimed that three things combined perfectly to propel Nyad towards Key West at double or triple her usual velocity:

1. Nyad’s baseline swimming speed
2. the current’s speed and direction
3. the heading of Voyager (the guide boat)

 

Engaging in what he called “vectoring,” he would take #1 and #2 into account to find the perfect #3, the heading that would maximize Nyad’s Key-West-bound speed. He pointed to a 5.5-hour period during which Nyad scudded along at about four mph towards Key West.

That account conflicts with what he told a journalist five days earlier. He said, “his biggest challenge during the voyage was keeping on course going so slow. She was swimming about 1 mile per hour and the current was going 4 miles per hour, sideways.” By last year, Nyad’s average swimming speed had jumped to 2.2 miles per hour, while the Gulf Stream rocketed along at 6.6 mph “due east the whole time.”

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Ratification

To date, twelve years after the attempt, Nyad’s crossing remains unratified. At first, Nyad feigned unconcern about official approval:

I’m sure this swim will be ratified in due time. And that’s fine, but [I] just don’t care about it. (Diana Nyad at press conference, 43:45, clip/partial transcript)

In the days after her crossing, Nyad said that the approval process was underway, but it would take time:

It takes them a while to vet records. . . . We had two independent observers over there — Janet Hinkle and Roger McVeigh. . . . They took copious, accurate notes. At some point, the Swimming Hall of Fame or the Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame will call them and say, “let’s sit down with you,” and, you know, “did she ever get out on the boat, did she ever put on a pair of fins?” (41:55 at press conf. or transcript)

[Hinkle and McVeigh] are typing up their notes and I want to ask you where to send them. To you? (Nyad to Munatones, 4 Sep 2013)

We have submitted two independents overseers comprehensive and accuracy observation notes from the entire crossing. These will be judged by the auspices of the sport and different record keepers (Facebook, 6 Sep 2013, archived).

Sometime in 2018, South African athlete Cameron Bellamy began inquiring about a Cuba-Florida attempt for the following year. With Nyad’s swim still unratified, a ratified Bellamy crossing would make his the first without a shark cage. Munatones and Nyad began scrambling to get Nyad’s crossing ratified. They gathered supporting documents to send to the ISHOF; Munatones vandalized thousands of pages on Openwaterpedia, his “Wikipedia for the open water swimming world,” to make Nyad’s claim as the best marathon swimmer of the 1970s appear true.

In March 2019, Munatones sent the documents to the ISHOF. Presumably, he and Nyad hoped that someone at the ISHOF would look at the materials and stamp them “Approved.” But the ISHOF doesn’t ratify swims, so Rutemiller filed them away.

Eight months later, with a Bellamy swim still looming, Munatones took action. On August 14, he edited Nyad’s Openwaterpedia entry to read that WOWSA had:

1. Written the rules for the swim (you know, the ones that no one has ever seen).
2. Provided its observers (whom we know Nyad enlisted on the day before the swim).
3. “Recognized” the crossing as of September 2, 2013, (which is weird because, on September 17, 2013, Munatones told the Miami Herald that the swim had “no organization regulating it”).

 

He left everything else intact, including a separate statement that Nyad’s Cuba–Florida claims “have yet to be independently verified by any swimming organization.” Which is odd, since Munatones had said his organization verified it.

In 2021, Nyad claimed that her swim had been ratified:

WOWSA has fully sanctioned our swim . . . I cannot fathom why you are so angry in expressing your blatantly incorrect statements. (Facebook reply to Lisa Amorao, 5 Sep 2021, archived).

A year later, a representative of WOWSA overhauled Nyad’s Openwaterpedia entry. Notably, they removed the fake ratification and added information about their recently released Nyad report. By 2023 and the premiere of her biopic, Nyad realized that submitting poor documentation would get her nowhere. She began feigning ignorance:

Five years after her swim, Nyad requested that WOWSA ratify, or recognize, the accomplishment in some way . . . Nyad says she was never told that she needed to provide documentation for that recognition.

Which contradicts what she said the day after she left the water. It also contradicts her document submissions to WOWSA, the ISHOF, and possibly other “auspices of the sport and different record keepers.” Given the lack of documentation for her crossing, it’s unlikely it will ever receive official sanction.

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4. Trust

 

Sarah Thomas’s course. From track.rs via NPR.

At 6:12 a.m. local time on September 17, 2019, Sarah Thomas crawled up onto Shakespeare Beach in Dover to complete the first English Channel four-way crossing in history.

Thomas’s triumph may turn out to be the most astonishing marathon swim of the 21st century, yet no one questioned its legitimacy. Thomas swam according to predetermined rules. The Channel Swimming & Piloting Federation, one of the two primary English Channel governing bodies, provided Thomas’s two observers: Suzanne Martin, who had already observed more than 10 crossings, including a pair of two-ways; and Kevin Murphy, who had observed at least 16 crossings and swum the channel 34 times himself. Martin and Murphy kept regular, accurate logs, verifying that Thomas swam from shore to shore to shore to shore to shore in squeaky clean, unquestionably ethical fashion.

Diana Nyad could have conducted her Cuba–Florida crossing the same way, less three shores and one history of integrity. But she chose not to. During the conference call a week after her crossing, she complained, “I never ever knew that we would not be trusted.” But she knew; problems on previous attempts guaranteed that other marathon swimmers would watch this one closely. “Not everyone was in her camp,” Steven Munatones wrote as Nyad approached Key West, “and a few never will be. She faced derision from coaches and marathon swimmers . . . She regularly faced suspicion and incredulity.”

This leaves us with the question that the incredulous have been asking for years, the question marathon swimmer and conference call participant Donal Buckley asked Nyad a week after Nyad finished her crossing:

Why, in a swim with global visibility and of a commercial nature, therefore unlike any other swim, didn’t [you] set out to maximise transparency and use fully independent observers?

With almost a century of marathon swimming experience between them, Nyad and Munatones knew that trained observers, good documentation, and transparency would have eliminated skepticism.

Experienced open water swimmers had volunteered to help. Before Nyad’s 2012 attempt, Ned Denison, current chair of the International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame, offered to help create a Florida Straits organization to set rules and sanction crossings. But Nyad and Munatones knew that any set of rules would constrain her ability to do “whatever she needed to do to complete the swim.” Competent, experienced observers would also limit her options.

So, Nyad arranged a crossing that maximized doubt but minimized the likelihood she would appear to fail. With no chance to make her dream come true legitimately, she found another way.