Winning an Olympic medal was Diana Nyad’s first Xtreme Dream, but she was never fast enough to qualify for the Olympic Trials. That hasn’t stopped her, though, from claiming that she did.

Who Placed Sixth?
Diana Nyad Erases Another Young Woman From History

With five meters to go in the 100 backstroke final of the 1968 Olympic Trials, Kaye Hall of Tacoma, Washington, is well ahead, but less than two seconds separate the remaining seven swimmers. Only the top three finishers earn a trip to Mexico City.

Among the seven trailing Hall is 14-year-old Laura Novak of Dearborn, Michigan. Novak won a state championship at 12. Two years later, she finds herself going head-to-head against some of the greatest athletes in the world. The three officials in her lane lean in with their stopwatches as Novak stretches for the wall.

A few minutes later, her coach gives her the bad news: sixth place.

 

 

You can also watch Nyad tell her Olympic Trials story during her 2015 Lake Forest College commencement address and at the 2016 Future Farmers of America Convention.

In 1968, instantaneous results via touchpads and electronic scoring were new, costly, and rare. The men’s trials had them. The women’s did not. Diana Nyad didn’t know that, though, because she wasn’t at the women’s trials. She didn’t qualify for the Olympic Trials in 1968 or any other year.

On the right are the results from the 100 backstroke heats at the 1968 trials. You’ll find Laura Novak in heat four. You won’t find Diana Nyad anywhere.

 

Could Someone Have Mistakenly Omitted Nyad From the Results?

No, because Nyad wasn’t there. Had she competed, she would have known about the scoreboard.

She also would have known that the women swam in Los Angeles, not Long Beach:

[B]y the grace of God, I made it into the final eight. The Olympic trials were at Long Beach. Eight people are going to go for the three top spots. Three people would then get to go to Mexico City . . . (“The Courage to Succeed”)

Why did she make that mistake? Because the men’s trials took place in Long Beach. The women competed at the Los Angeles Swim Stadium, a facility built for the 1932 Olympics.

 

	Above: The Los Angeles Swim Stadium during the 1932 Olympics. Partially visible in the upper right is the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. (Image via the Huntington Library.) Below: Screenshot from “1968 Olympics: Women’s Swimming Trials” showing the Coliseum in the background. Janie Barkman represented the U.S. at the Olympics in 1968 and 1972, earning two golds and a bronze.

 

 

By 1968, the L.A. Swim Stadium hadn’t yet upgraded to an electronic scoreboard. Electronic touchpad timing for aquatics only became available the year before.  At that time, a new Omega system would set you back about $500,000, around four million in today’s dollars.

Nyad knew none of this when she began telling her trials story sometime in the 1980s or ’90s. However, as a sports commentator, she’d have seen many electronic scoreboards by then. She must have assumed that the 1968 women’s venue had one. Not to mention that waiting for results would kill the momentum of her story.

 

Above: Nyad in an ABC Wide World of Sports promotional photo from 1979. Note the electronic scoreboard in the background. (Image via Zimbio, which no longer appears to exist. Archived.)

Below: Rather than an electronic scoreboard, the women’s trials had what looks like a fancy bulletin board. Screenshot from “1968 Olympics: Women’s Swimming Trials.”

 

When Diana Requests a Change of Venue

Despite claiming to “remember it like it was yesterday,” Nyad sometimes changes the race’s location. I’ve heard her tell her tale three different ways location-wise:

1. She’s at the trials.
   She tells this version to three real Olympians on the Roseanne Show in 1998, in her 2015 Lake Forest commencement speech (1:02:42), and at the 2016 Future Farmers of America Convention.
2. She’s at the trials . . . but maybe she’s not.
   In her 2014 Middlebury College commencement address, she says: “and it came to be the Olympic Trials for Mexico City, 1968.” Later in the speech, though, she hedges: “it was either going to be this one or the next one when the three go on to Mexico City” (transcript here).
3. She’s at a non-specific meet before the trials.
   In her 2015 memoir, Find a Way, she describes an unnamed pre-trials event:

 

It was my last 100-meter backstroke. The last hoorah, with an outside, desperate chance at the elite trials. Top three would go on to compete for a coveted spot on the Mexico City team. The other five would go on to the rest of our lives.

I am sixth. I go over to shake hands with the three girls who are moving on. (p. 50)

 

No matter the venue, though, her story always ends the same: touch wall, check electronic scoreboard, miss top three.

But no meet in which Nyad swam before the trials had an electronic scoreboard. More importantly, in qualifying for the trials, top three meant nothing. Swimmers in 1968 had to achieve a time standard just like they do today. Once at the trials, though, “top three” meant everything because it got you a seat on the plane to Mexico City. So Nyad’s always talking about the trials, even when she’s not.

U.S. women's qualifying times for the 1968 Olympic Trials.

 

In a 1974 Military Life article, Nyad changes her story in another way, claiming to have swum the 400 IM at the trials and placed fifth. The results, however, show former world record-holder Patty Caretto taking fifth. Claudia Kolb, who went on to win the event in Mexico City, finished first in world-record time.

But Nyad never talks about any of these great athletes or their record-breaking swims. When Nyad speaks of the trials, she mentions only one name: Diana Nyad.

On the other hand, in her 1978 memoir, Other Shores, she doesn’t bring up the Olympic Trials at all. Had Nyad been there, she would have said something.

So How About Those Men?

Two days after the women finished in Los Angeles, the men’s event began 25 miles down the freeway in Long Beach. The city’s new Belmont Plaza Pool had opened just two weeks earlier with a celebration, the program for which boasts that Belmont’s “Electronic scoring and timing equipment is [the] most modern available.” If Nyad saw photos of the men’s trials or watched it on television, she would have seen the facility’s state-of-the-art electronics and probably assumed that the women had the same.

But you know what assuming does: It makes you think that everyone swam in Long Beach and had an electronic scoreboard.

Screenshot of the scoreboard at Belmont Plaza (via “1968 Olympics: Men’s Swimming Trials.”)

 

 

 

---

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the many people who contributed to this entry. In particular, I am immensely thankful to one 1968 Olympic Trials competitor whose input regarding the event—and regarding timing systems—enriched this page beyond measure, electronic or otherwise.

 

---

Further Reading and Watching

Here’s what attendees at Nyad’s events learned about her Olympic Trials experience:

Amanda Hammon writing in the Nevada Appeal about a Carson City Library talk in 2002:

 

 

Brittany Breaux writing in her Fit Formula blog about an unnamed 2014 event:

 

 

This writeup of a 2017 Target corporate event:

 

 

Susan Peck writing on her Call to Excellence Life Coaching blog:

 

Swimming World magazine 1968 Olympic Trial issue.

Detail from the cover of Swimming World, 9 Sep 1968.

 

Olympic Trials compilation video (starring Diana Nyad).

“Denigrating Women”—more about some of the great Olympic Trials swimmers whom Nyad ignores.

 

Blog posts

• “Diana’s Kaleidoscopic Convalescence”
  Nyad often claims that she missed the Olympics because of a 1966 illness that kept her out of the water for six weeks or three months or a year or . . . well, it depends on the version Nyad’s telling. Summary here.
• “New Arrivals: Roseanne, Doc, an Injured Clock, and a Lost Boek Found”
• “The Olympic Roots of Diana Nyad’s Abuse Allegations”

 

Above: Associated Press photo of damaged scoreboard at 1967 Pan American Games in Winnipeg. The same image appears in the Wisconsin State Journal. The Miami Herald published a different view (with Nyad coincidentally on the same page).