NyadFactCheck
In search of the truth about Diana Nyad
Nyad devotes one paragraph of her memoir, Find A Way, to skepticism about her Cuba-Florida swim:
I was criticized and questioned for a couple of days by a band of marathon swimmers, their incredulity piqued, I guess, at someone actually achieving this supposedly unachievable feat. They suggested I must have secretly exited the water and slept on the boat for hours at a time. John Bartlett hosted a long conference call with a representative group of them, citing from his computer GPS charts the tracking of literally every quarter mile of the journey, how fast the current was traveling in what direction, plus how fast my swimming speed calculated at each quarter mile. 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, to ensure that the history will survive long after I and the forty-four who accompanied me and bore witness to the swim are gone. John’s is an impressive mind, and his empirical proof of our course satisfied all but a couple¹ of what they call online “haters.”² (There are still those who don’t believe Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.³) There is no keeping a secret among forty-four people.⁴ This swim was a noble quest and a matter of indisputable ethics to each one of us. We sleep easily,⁵ consciences clear that I swam across fair and square, shore to shore. (p. 278)
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