Nyad is a movie that was just released on October 20, 2023. It is based on the 2015 memoir by the actual Diana Nyad that chronicles her 2013 attempt to become the first person to ever swim from Cuba to Florida at 64-years-old.
Nyad stars Annette Benning (as Nyad) and Jodie Foster (as her sometimes coach/girlfriend) and many have mentioned that one or both will get Oscar nominations for their roles in the movie.
But is any of the movie – or Nyad’s life – true? According to a lengthy Defector article, Nyad is a fraud. Click the cut to learn more about the George Santos of Endurance Swimming…
Now, I want to briefly start by saying I have never heard of this woman or this movie, but just learned about her a few hours ago and read this absolutely crazy article. It was long but I was enthralled. I have close, personal experience with a habitual or pathological liar who tried to ruin my life, and thus was curious to see the extent of her lies. Now, the entire article is worth a read, but I’ll pull summarize some of the whackier parts of the article.
So basically Nyad really pissed off this one guy, Daniel Slosberg, who was really into endurance swimming and he started a website chronically her lies in detail. It’s really quite impressive. He has spent countless hours doing this just because he hates her so much – which is kind of admirable. I, too, love to hate.
The Lies
– Let’s start with the big one and the reason for the movie. Nyad claimed to be the first person to swim the Florida Strait from Florida to Cuba in 2013. Yeah, not true. Walter Poenisch did it in 1978.
– She is reported to have completed the Cuba to Florida swim in 52 hours, 54 minutes, 18.6 seconds. Some people really doubted this because the GPS data showed that her average speed went from 1.5mph to at least 3.9mph for a period of several hours late in the swim, causing some to think she had received improper assistance (holding on to or even riding in a boat). Now, is this a for sure lie? No. Some argue that there’s data suggesting the currents changed and made this possible late in the swim. (FYI: Michael Phelps’s average speed in his world-record 400M individual medley swim was about 3.7mph).
– Her lies go way back, though. In 1975, she swam around Manhattan. In her 2015 memoir, she notes that she was the first woman to do so! WRONG. She was the seventh woman. Weirdly, in her 1978 autobiography, she even mentions some of the women who circled the island before her. Keeping track of this stuff is hard, obviously.
– She has on a number of occasions told the story of her swimming in the trials for the 1968 Olympic Games. She remarks on how she placed fifth (as she claimed in 1974) or sixth (as she claimed in 2015) and remembers looking up on the electronic scoreboard. There’s a few problems here – there was no electronic scoreboard at the 1968 Olympic trials. Oh – maybe I buried the lede – she was never at the Olympic trials. LOLOLOL.
[TW: SEX ABUSE]-Nyad has a often retold story about how she met a lady at a restaurant and she noticed she had a tattooed wrist. The waitress told her how she was a Holocaust survivor from Poland whose parents were killed at a specific German camp when she was three-years-old and she was made into a sex slave for three years. It’s some weird overcoming adversity story she tells. Anyway, according to Holocaust historians, folks from that area would have gone to a Polish camp, not a German camp; the camp that she specifically references was for men only (thus the waitress and her mom and sister could not have been there); AND only Auschwitz gave tattoos (which is not the camp that was mentioned). There’s some extra level of fucked up-ness to constructing an elaborate Holocaust tale and also just WHY?
– I’ll leave some mystery to the article for those who are interested in reading it, so this is my last one: Nyad claims to had swam the English channel twice. You guessed it – also a lie – she never completed this swim.
And now she has a possible Oscar-nominated movie about her – so I guess these lies all paid off.
If you read the article, check out the last few lines about the movie’s producers and whether they present their film as based on a true story. It’ll give you a laugh.
Alright guys – thanks for joining me – this is my first post on ONTD in history and I think I’ve been a member for a couple decades or so. I have no idea if I did this right, so please be kind, and if I need to edit anything – please let me know, mods!
