The media world is exploding in news about how a community of marathon swimmers is now questioning whether Diana Nyad actually accomplished the feat to swim the 110 miles from Cuba to Florida. See for instance philly.com, 10News, Ocala.com, ABC Action News, pnj.com, Las Vegas Guardian Express, The Vancouver Sun, ESPN, cbs12.com, …
On social media and the online Marathon Swimmers Forum, long-distance swimmers have been debating whether Nyad got a boost from the boat that was accompanying her – either by getting in it or holding onto it – during a particularly speedy stretch of her swim. They also question whether she violated the traditions of her sport – many follow strict guidelines known as the English Channel rules – by using a specialized mask and body suit to protect herself from jellyfish.
“When you know how hard it is, you kind of want those details,” said Andrew Malinak, a Seattle long-distance swimmer who crunched the data available from the GPS positions tracked on Nyad’s website and concluded that he didn’t trust what he saw.
Nyad’s navigator and one of the swim’s official observers told the Associated Press over the weekend that Nyad didn’t cheat and that she was aided during the rapid part of her swim by a swift current. And neither Nyad nor her team ever said she would follow English Channel rules, developed for swimming the waters between England and France. Those rules outlaw neoprene wetsuits and contact with a support boat. Nyad wore a full non-neoprene bodysuit, gloves, booties and a silicone mask at night, when jellyfish are a particular problem, and removed the suit once she got over the reef on her approach to Key West.
http://youtu.be/Dd9atzCLTnE
See also The Marathon Swimmers Forum here, here, and here
In an entirely different attack, Frontpage Mag writes that Diana Nyad ‘desecrated 50,000 graves’
Many Cubans completed the hundred-mile journey on flotation devices most of us wouldn’t board outside a backyard swimming pool. Many more died horribly in the attempt from dehydration, sunburn, drowning, sharks and machine-gunnings by Diana Nyad’s hosts and facilitators. Diana Nyad describes Castro-regime apparatchik Jose Miguel Diaz Escrich as a “good friend.†Escrich runs the Castro-regime’s Hemingway Marina from where Nyad started her swim and from where the patrol boats and Soviet helicopters would depart to machine-gun desperate freedom-seekers.
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