Daniel Slosberg is the Tom Joad of Diana Nyad’s bullshitting. Whenever she’s out there beatin’ up the truth, he’ll be there.
So Slosberg was in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. earlier this month as town officials planted a plaque at Las Olas Beach to honor Nyad, a local kid who grew up to be as famous as any female American swimmer of the pre-Ledecky era. Slosberg says he hadn’t flown in 10 years, but when he heard that the woman who Slosberg calls “swimming’s greatest fraud,” was going to be commemorated by public servants, he had to get on a plane.
If you believe Nyad’s version of history, it was on that very plot of sand that her nine-year-old self first fantasized about swimming from Cuba to the U.S. She finally made that jaunt–again, if you believe Nyad–in 2013 when she was 64 years old, as immortalized in the Oscar-nominated feature film, Nyad.
Here’s how the Miami Herald capsulized the plaque’s backstory:
Diana Nyad’s crazy dream of swimming from Cuba to Florida began as a little girl, standing on the shores of Fort Lauderdale Beach. Thousands of Cuban refugees had just arrived in South Florida after the revolution. Fascinated, Nyad peered into the horizon. “Mom, everyone says Cuba is so close, but I can’t see it,” Nyad told her mother. “Where is it?”
Her mother pointed and said, “It’s right there. It’s right across this horizon. As a matter of fact, it’s so close, you little champion swimmer you, you could actually swim there.”
What a tale!
All hogwash, Slosberg says.
“Not a word of that is true,” Slosberg said in a write-up of the plaque planting ceremony that ran in Swimming World magazine. “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.”
It should be noted here, just as it was noted in abundance by Defector in 2023, that in Slosberg’s eyes Nyad’s only got one gear. The hogwash gear. He was an endurance swimmer of some note in the 1970s, and says at some point he just got tired of seeing Nyad get more attention than marathoners with far greater accomplishments. He wasn’t the first to point out her genius for self-promotion: A 1979 Sports Illustrated piece about marathon swimming had former USA Olympic swim team coach James “Doc” Counsilman decrying Nyad’s fame-to-accomplishments ratio and labeling her "a very mediocre swimmer with a very good publicist.” But nobody’s been as dedicated, obsessive even, as Slosberg in calling attention to Nyad’s falsehoods. About a decade ago, he started a website, Nyadfactcheck.com, that exists only to chronicle her every fib.
And as all Slosberg admirers know well, over time Nyad really has told enough whoppers to fill an Olympic-sized pool. His recent travelogue from Fort Lauderdale mixed in some of the most fabulous fabulisms of Nyad’s first half-century of making shit up. Such as when Nyad hailed herself as the first woman to swim around Manhattan, when she knew lots of others had already done it before her 1975 trip. And her emotional and amazingly detailed recollections about swimming at the 1968 U.S. Olympic trials, a meet she never even qualified for. He left out the creepiest of Nyad’s truthless anecdotes, the one about befriending a woman who was a Nazi sex slave at Dachau during the Holocaust. (Slosberg got a Dachau historian to debunk Nyad’s tale.)
Slosberg and others off put by Nyad’s falsehoods had lobbied against the Fort Lauderdale memorial for years. And they had some successes: The marker was rejected by Fort Lauderdale officials in 2018.
But the plaque proposal resurfaced after Nyad, starring Annette Bening and Jodie Foster, hit Netflix and movie theaters. Nyad had famous friends in the area that supported the project, including Fort Lauderdale native Chris Evert; the tennis icon showed up at the plaque ceremony to hail Nyad as “one of the most real and authentic women I’ve ever known.” And Nyad got her memorial approved after personally meeting with city commission members.
Slosberg kept working to remove as much of what he regards as factually incorrect information as he could from the plaque’s text before it was placed on the beach. He wrote earlier this year about how the plaque initially exaggerated the ties between that beach and Nyad’s marathon swimming. The commission had approved the Las Olas beach site because they believed Nyad’s claims that she trained there for marathons, but Slosberg alerted members that his research indicated that “Nyad didn’t learn about the sport [of marathon swimming] until years after she left Florida.”
And thanks to Slosberg, over time the text on the plaque went from “Nyad practiced frequently at Fort Lauderdale Beach” to “She later trained off of this beach” to “She later trained off nearby beaches” to, finally, “She swam at nearby beaches.”
In his magazine dispatch about the ceremony, Slosberg juxtaposes Nyad’s memorial marker to another plaque on opposite sides of the same beach, one which honors the Fort Lauderdale Wade-Ins. That was a group of black civil rights fighters who ignored local codes and their personal safety by walking onto the whites-only beach and wading in the water together on July 4, 1961. Their righteous act led to copycat righteousness and called enough attention to the systemic racism to get the local beaches opened to swimmers of color.
“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,” Slosberg writes. “Visitors can now pace off the exact distance between courage and con artistry.”
Because of a lack of evidence to corroborate Nyad’s account of what went down when she made her Cuba to Florida trek in 2013, no major swimming organization has yet officially sanctioned her most famous swim. Slosberg definitely takes some pride in that. But, for all his blog posts and anti-Nyad crusading, she still got her damn plaque.
“I think Nyad’s winning,” he said.
