The Best American Sports Writing 2015

by Wright Thompson

  Her mother died shortly before Nyad turned 60, and something shifted inside her. “I don’t care how healthy I am—it’s not like I’m going to live another 60 years,” she said. “There’s a real speeding up of the clock and a choking on, ‘Who have you become? Because this one-way street is hurtling toward the end now, and you better be the person you admire.’” She didn’t want to ponder her past anymore. “I used to be such a maverick in the 1970s,” she said. “I was one of the few people—certainly one of the few women—doing these kinds of extreme things.” She wanted the “thrill of commitment”: a magnificent goal that would consume all self-doubt. “Cuba, because the dream had been there before, I thought, ‘Boy, that’s a dream I could rekindle.’”

  But it seemed impossible: you could never do at 60 what you did at 30, let alone what you couldn’t do at 30. The body disintegrates every year, every hour. “In some parts one grows woody; in others one goes bad,” the critic Charles Sainte-Beuve wrote. “Never does one grow ripe.” And yet: Cuba. So close you could swim there.

  “We usually know where each other is,” Bonnie Stoll, who has been Nyad’s best friend for more than 30 years, recalled. “Suddenly there’d be hours of time when she’d be all squirrelly—three, four hours at a time where I don’t know where she is, because she’s swimming.” After Nyad revealed her plan, Stoll accompanied her on a training swim in Mexico and saw her in the water for the first time. “One hour in, I saw that she was meant to do it,” Stoll told me. “She was one with the water. There was no difference; she was just part of it. That lasted six or eight hours. I said, ‘Okay, let’s go.’”

  Nyad announced her intention to the rest of her friends at a party. “I feel powerful—I’ve got a lot of chi left in this life,” she shouted, pacing poolside in a white bathing suit. “When I walk up on this beach this time, the whole world’s going to see: 60 is the new 40!” Then she leaped into the water.

  Nyad met Stoll playing racquetball; Stoll was once among the top 10 professional players in the country. The two dated briefly, and then settled into a jock friendship, working out together constantly. After Stoll, who has the demeanor of an exceptionally jovial drill sergeant, retired from racquetball, she became a trainer, and she helped Nyad prepare for Cuba. She wasn’t particularly concerned about Nyad’s age. “Endurance sports are very different from other kinds of sports: the mind is a large part of the endeavor,” she said. “And Diana has a different kind of mind.”

  Steven Munatones, the director of the World Open Water Swimming Association, told me, “If you run, eventually your joints give out. In basketball, you can dunk at 22 but probably not at 42, and certainly not at 62.” Munatones, who is a performance consultant for a variety of athletes (when we spoke, he was on the way to coach skiers for the Olympics in Sochi), said that swimming is different: “If you are inclined to, you can do it until the day you die. Marathon swimmers aren’t Michael Phelps. They are not being measured on aerobic capacity. If Diana’s aerobic capacity decreases, she just slows down.”

  But the slower she swims the longer she has to stay awake, and to get from Cuba to Florida at any pace she would have to swim for days on end. Nyad has always operated without a lot of rest, though. In fifth grade, she wrote an essay called “What I Will Do for the Rest of My Life,” in which she announced, “I want to play six instruments. I want to be the best in the world at two things. I want to be a great athlete and I want to be a great surgeon. I need to practice hard every day. I need to sleep as little as possible.” Stoll told me, “Diana is the least lazy person I have ever met in my life.”

  After Mexico, Stoll began to gather information: “Let’s figure out the nutrition; let’s write to people. But nobody really knows.” What they wanted to do had never been accomplished by anyone, male or female, at any age. Stoll said that she could “see the playing field: in endurance sports, you have to build up and then you have to taper down in order to peak at the right time.” But they couldn’t simply pick a date to begin the swim. They had to wait for a window when the currents and the wind would not make the journey impossible. Even then, at any moment—after, say, 40 hours of swimming—the weather could suddenly force them to stop.

  They estimated that the expedition would cost about half a million dollars. Nyad needed a boat with a crew and an experienced navigator that she could follow. She needed a medic, in case she collapsed in the water. (In 1959, the Greek swimmer Jason Zirganos, attempting to cross the North Channel of the Irish Sea, suddenly stopped stroking after 16 and a half hours. The medic in his crew cut his chest open with a pocketknife and performed open-heart massage, but Zirganos died before they reached land.) Nyad would need handlers available the entire time she was swimming, calling her toward them every 90 minutes, so that they could feed her over the side of the boat. (In keeping with the rules of the sport, they would have to feed her without touching her, as if dangling fish into the mouth of a dolphin.) Finally, the entire crew would need plane tickets and paperwork to get to Cuba. They began raising money.

  When Nyad wasn’t working on logistics, she trained ferociously. She spent the first half of 2010 going for 12-, then 18-, then 24-hour swims off of St. Martin, where there are rarely sharks to contend with. For the Cuba swim, Nyad and Stoll decided that they would employ shark divers and kayakers for protection: Nyad had bad memories of swimming inside the shark cage, and, furthermore, an Australian named Susie Maroney had made the swim in a cage in 1997; Nyad wanted to accomplish something unprecedented. She and Stoll found a company that produces a kind of shark shocker—a telephone-sized contraption with a seven-foot antenna that drags in the water and emits a shark-repelling electromagnetic field.

  Early in the summer of 2010, Nyad and Stoll went to Florida and waited for the right conditions. “Ninety-one days in a row sitting in Key West—trained, ready, expedition paid for—looking at the winds, calling the meteorologists,” Nyad remembered, shaking her head. “The winds never stopped coming from the east. And when they come from the east and the Gulf Stream’s going east they hit and they form giant peaks. And you can’t make it. Then the water temperatures get too cold by the end of September.” In early October, she sent an email to friends and donors: “I got in better shape both body and mind than even in my twenties. It has been draining, ripping of the spirit to feel it all slip away from me.”

  “It’s hard for me to remember even now—the heartache the day we went and packed up, after all the training, the fund-raising,” she told me. “Now you’re waiting until next July. And training again.” Relinquishing the Cuba swim did not feel like an option. When she returned to L.A., she was “just looking up a mountain of knowing I was going to go back. Because there is no way I’m not going to do that fucking swim.” The waiting and the training would be their own test of endurance.

  A pronounced ability to tolerate pain is common among marathon swimmers. Agony in the sport is a given. The body suffers from being immersed for days in salt water: when a swimmer swallows water as she breathes, it abrades the soft tissue of the lips, the tongue, and the throat. The throat starts to swell shut; in one case, Munatones said, “they literally had to cut the person’s throat to get air in.” Salt water is nauseating, and swimmers, already seasick from being thrown by waves, vomit during marathons, losing valuable calories.

  The water in the Straits of Florida, where Nyad wanted to swim, is relatively warm. But even the balmiest seawater is colder than body temperature, and hypothermia is a grave danger. Blood flows to the body’s core to protect the vital organs, and, as the condition progresses, the extremities fail. The victim becomes confused and can lose consciousness; in the worst case, her heart stops. Most swimmers tolerate a certain degree of hypothermia. The problem is that by the time a swimmer is dangerously hypothermic she has stopped feeling cold. “Every year, people get in trouble,” Munatones said. “When their crew pulls them out, they seem catatonic, their blood pressure is low, their eyes roll back in the sockets.”

 
Swimmers call the process of acclimating the body to cold and seasickness “hardening”: the earned capacity to survive for long stretches underwater, where humans are not designed to be. People who excel at this tend to be exceptionally good at refocusing their minds when confronted with pain or danger. Recently, Nyad took part in an experiment with a psychiatrist at the University of California–San Diego, in which subjects’ air supply was restricted for undisclosed intervals and their panic response measured, using MRIs. Nyad stayed as calm as Navy SEALs who participated in the experiment. Open-water swimmers tend to have “a survival mentality,” Munatones said. “You literally have to go to the edge. With athletes in general, they say that, but normally that means jump high or run fast—it’s not a matter of life or death.

  “Every open-water swimmer I know, they make lists,” he continued. “They remember their exact time, to the second, of a swim they did 20 years ago; they count their strokes.” When Nyad takes a long flight, she buys a family-size pack of M&Ms. In her seat, she takes the candy out of the bag, counts it, and puts back an equal number of each color. (She eats the extras.) She divides the length of the flight by the number of remaining M&Ms and then eats them at even intervals, keeping track of what color she pulls out of the bag every time. “I want to finish them exactly when I land,” she said. “Of course, if you don’t land on time, then you’re screwed, and your whole OCD personality is in crisis.” On training swims for Cuba, if she got to her point of exit ahead of schedule, she would continue swimming around until she’d hit her planned duration to the second.

  Open-water swimmers must be able to control their minds—it is all they can control, unlike the weather, the sharks, the currents. “They feel sick or cold or whatever, they have to be able to think of something else to continue,” Munatones said. “Open-water swimmers have to be able to compartmentalize.”

  Nyad’s mother, Lucy Curtis, was born into a wealthy family, which made its money from a product called Soothing Syrup, and “used to live where Tiffany’s is now,” Nyad told me. But Lucy’s mother didn’t want her, and she was sent to France to be brought up by relatives “who knew Matisse and Gauguin” and lived “literally right next door to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas.” She was 17 when the war came to Paris, and, with her American passport, she escaped. “She got together with a group of people and—by bicycle and by walking through the South of France—they got across the Pyrenees and into Portugal, where they took a boat to Manhattan.”

  Lucy married Aristotle Nyad, a Greek Egyptian who looked like Omar Sharif and was a wonderful dancer. Diana often does an impression of him in speeches. “He called me over when I was five years old, and he had the large Webster’s dictionary open, and he said, ‘Dahling, I am waiting for five years, till you are ready to hear this moment,’” she told a TED conference in Berlin. He pointed to the word “naiad,” and explained that in Greek myth “these were the nymphs that swam in the lakes and rivers and the oceans to protect them for the gods! The modern definition says ‘girl or woman champion swimmer.’ This is your destiny, dahling!’” She started getting up at four-thirty or five every morning to swim for two hours before school, with an hour of sprints at lunchtime; after school she got in the pool for another two hours. “I would be so tired at night I couldn’t eat dinner,” she said.

  Aristotle Nyad was a con man, and the family—Lucy, Diana, her sister, Liza, and their brother, William, who was schizophrenic—had to move frequently to keep ahead of the people he had lied to and stolen from. “My father, I always thought, was, you know, scary and fun,” Nyad said. “Magnetic and terrifying.” She adored her mother, but described her as weak. Aris, as he was called, had a violent temper, and several times Lucy had to go to the hospital after he attacked her. Diana became skilled at diverting her attention, focusing on the goals she set for herself at school and in the pool.

  Her parents broke up when she was a teenager, and she did not see Aris for 20 years. One day, when she was living with Nina Lederman, on West 86th Street, he showed up at their apartment at four in the morning. “He says, ‘Dahling, please, I want to see you. I love you so much.’ He’s wearing a white dinner jacket. He’s got a bucket of some incredibly expensive champagne. He’s got fresh-squeezed orange juice. He says, ‘Dahling, oh, I have thought of you every day for 20 years!’” He stayed that night and the next, when Nyad and Lederman were having a dinner party. “He makes a salmon with homemade risotto,” Nyad told me. “Gets these expensive Greek wines. Comes back at night with flowers for every woman at the party. Shows the men card tricks. Dances. We stay up till dawn. Everybody calls me the next day and says, ‘Your father is the most fascinating person alive, and his work with the UN is just incredible!’ Then the next person calls and says, ‘To be a professor of classics at the Sorbonne and to make it all the way over for this party was just amazing.’ They’re going to find out the truth when he’s gone. But he’s gone. And I never saw him again. Poof. Gone.”

  Throughout Nyad’s childhood, Aris had disappeared and reemerged, and once she reached puberty it was better if he was away. When she was 11, he took her to the beach one afternoon, and when they stopped after swimming to wash off the sand he put his hand between her legs. “Like he could grab my crotch and hold it in his hand and look at me, like, ‘I got you—I got you right here. And I know how humiliated you feel, and this is fun.’” After that, Nyad strategized how to get to her room without crossing his path when she got home from school. She felt safest and most free underwater.

  As a seventh-grader at the Pine Crest School, in Florida, Nyad found a mentor: Jack Nelson, her swimming coach, a former Olympian, who convinced her that with his help she could become a star. “Finally, there’s somebody who truly is a leader and cares about me and thinks I’m going to capture the world,” Nyad told me. Within a year, she had won state championships in the 100- and 200-meter backstroke. “I had him on a pedestal—he was it. I was just dying for some leadership and I selected him. And I told him a lot of those stories about the parents.”

  So it was devastating when he forced himself on her, when she was 14, one afternoon as she was resting at his house before a swim meet. Throughout high school, Nyad says, he persuaded her to meet him in hotel rooms, at his office, in his car, and molested her. She would never be a great swimmer without him, he said, and this was what he needed from her in return; he told her that she had instigated the relationship by writing “I love Coach Nelson” on the cover of a notebook. Years later, Nyad disclosed the abuse to a former teammate, who said that she’d had the same experience. They reported him to the headmaster, and Nelson left at the end of that school year. He went on to become the swimming coach at Fort Lauderdale High School, and in 1993 Fort Lauderdale named him its man of the year. In 2007, Nelson made a statement to the Fort Lauderdale police denying the allegations of abuse; Nyad, he claimed, had told him once that she “wanted to be a writer, and wanted to have the ability to write things that were not true and make people believe them.”

  Nyad told me, “A lot of children who grew up with incest say, ‘Oh, I love my father—it’s very complicated.’ With the coach, for me, it’s not complicated. I’ve had all kinds of fantasies of being out in the woods and tying him to a tree and putting his penis on a marble slab and walking around with a hatchet and watching him cry and plead, and I’d say, ‘Oh, remember me? Remember when I was crying? You didn’t seem to care too much about my feelings.’ And then leaving him to bleed to death.”

  When Nyad was in college, her mother revealed that Aris was her stepfather, and that her real father had left when she was three years old. By the time Aris died, in 1998, Nyad had already made peace with her memories of him. “People say, ‘Where’d you get this drive?’” she told me. “Early on, I thought, ‘I’m in this alone. I’m going to be taking care of myself.’”

  On the evening of August 7, 2011, after a second year of nonstop training, Nyad and Stoll and their crew set out from Havana Harbor. “There was just
no doubt in any of our minds, ‘We’re going all the way,’” Nyad said.

  Distance swimmers spend most of their athletic life staring down into murky water, isolated by sensory deprivation. “You are swimming essentially blind and deaf,” Munatones told me. “Imagine doing the New York Marathon and not being able to see around you. Most people would finish the marathon crazy—in fact, they wouldn’t be able to finish at all.” Nyad gets through the hours by singing songs in her head—Neil Young, the Beatles. She counts in sets of 100, first in English and then in German, Spanish, and, finally, French. She thinks about a one-woman show she wants to perform and fantasizes about appearing on Dancing with the Stars.

  For the Cuba swim, Nyad followed an illuminated path in the water; her team had developed a streamer studded with LEDs that trailed off a support boat, so that she could swim above it. They couldn’t shine a beam into the water to track her—light attracts animals—so she swam with a little red light attached to her swim cap.

  By the end of the first night, she had excruciating pain in her right shoulder—“I feel like it’s going to come out of the socket,” she told Stoll from the water—and the current was pushing them backward. A few hours later, Nyad suffered a severe asthma attack, the first she’d ever had in the water, and every few strokes she had to roll onto her back to catch her breath. Her doctor got in the water to give her puffs from an inhaler, and she pushed on, swimming so slowly that she developed severe chills. “I’m just dead,” Nyad called out to Stoll. “I’m dead.”