Guest Editorial: Steps Away from Hall of Fame, Fort Lauderdale Honors Swimming’s Greatest Fraud
By Daniel Slosberg
If the City of Fort Lauderdale’s International Swimming Hall of Fame (ISHOF) ever completes construction of its new home, visitors will be able to learn about the sport’s greatest champions, then walk five minutes to a plaque honoring swimming’s greatest fraud.
Fort Lauderdale unveiled a Florida State Historical Marker for Diana Nyad on November 6. About 100 guests — friends, relatives, politicians, and other admirers — gathered across Highway A1A from Las Olas Beach to hear speeches celebrating the ostensible “first person to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage.”
Mayor Dean Trantalis declared it “Diana Nyad Day.” Tennis legend and Fort Lauderdale native Chris Evert praised Nyad as “one of the most real and authentic women I’ve ever known…We celebrate your voice and your courage and the truth that you’ve always lived by.”
Beside Evert stood Nyad, immaculate in a cream pantsuit. She radiated confidence and charisma, which great liars like Nyad depend on us mistaking for authenticity. The City Commission voted to place the Marker at Las Olas because Nyad claims she trained there for her marathon swims (but Nyad didn’t learn about the sport until years after she left Florida).
And she claims it’s where her mother planted the idea for the Cuba crossing. Nyad told that story at the unveiling: She was 9 years old, and the Cuban Revolution had just ended. She asked where Cuba was located, and her mom pointed out to sea and said, “It’s right there. It’s so close, you little champion swimmer, you could actually swim there.”
Not a word of that is true. Nyad began swimming competitively at 12 and won her first championship at 14. But the story had to align with the end of the Cuban Revolution, so she made herself nine. She didn’t begin telling that story until 2014. Before that, she always discovered the Cuba swim by studying maps and charts.
Nyad built her career on what sportswriter Dave Heeren calls a “reverse hustle,” convincing the public and media that she’s a far better swimmer than she is. Most people know so little about marathon swimming that they believe her. But people who know the sport are likely to agree with Hall of Fame swim coach and English Channel swimmer James “Doc” Counsilman: “She’s a very mediocre swimmer with a very good publicist. Most of her swims have been failures.”
Heeren wrote about South Florida sports for over 40 years. He admired Nyad at first but eventually saw through her bluster. She has become such a master of hyperbole that she always seems able to lure a lapdog crowd of media to her events. Ability to mesmerize the media has enabled her to reap a substantial income from a poorly subsidized sport even after three Channel failures. Nyad made three unsuccessful English Channel attempts in 1976 and never returned.
I hear the complaints: “Men hate outspoken women.” Just before Nyad made her first Cuba-Florida attempt, Connie Sjostrom of the Fort Lauderdale News blasted Nyad as “the Queen of Hype.” In the New York Review of Books, Novelist Mary Gordon panned Nyad’s first memoir, Other Shores, saying, “It is nearly always a mistake to give accounts of one’s own heroism.”
But Nyad does more than trumpet her self-declared greatness. She has lied so brazenly for so long that almost no one questions her fabrications. Like finishing sixth in the 100-meter backstroke at the Olympic Trials — Nyad never qualified for the Trials. Or becoming the first woman to swim around Manhattan — she was seventh. Or winning a 37-hour race in 48° water — she’d have raced most of the event as a corpse.
Or swimming from Cuba to Florida “fair and square, shore to shore.” For over a decade, Nyad has prodded governing organizations to ratify her crossing. No takers.
Dr. Lynette Long, founder of Equal Opportunity Everywhere, first applied for a Nyad Marker in 2017. The City rejected her application after Brent Rutemiller, then-Director of ISHOF, spoke out about Nyad’s lies. Rutemiller had retired by the time the Commissioners reconsidered the Marker in 2024. The Hall, desperate for City funds to help rebuild, offered only mild resistance.
The City rubber-stamped the Marker last April. Local journalists could have worked to expose Nyad, but she seduced them, too. They regurgitated decade-old platitudes: So inspiring! Sixty-four-year-old LGBTQ swimmer finally achieves lifelong dream after five attempts. Sharks! Jellyfish!! Trauma!!!
Nyad’s Marker now stands across the Las Olas Beach entrance from the Fort Lauderdale Wade-Ins Marker. Unveiled in 2011, it honors Black activists who, in 1961, protested segregation by wading into the water at Whites-only beaches like Las Olas. So, on the entrance’s south side stands a Marker honoring those who risked their lives for justice and equality. On the north side, a Marker celebrates one of sports’ greatest frauds. Visitors can now pace off the exact distance between courage and con artistry.
Daniel Slosberg is a former marathon swimmer and the creator of the Diana Nyad Fact Check website.
