Revisiting Diana Nyad Real Conspiracy Theories

Just because you want sports champion stories to be true, doesn't mean they are (paging Lance Armstrong). This post from actual marathon swimming champion, Chloe McCardel caught my eye and bingo Diana Nyad is back in the news. She refers her followers to this compilation site of Nyad's lies.

I wrote this blog post "Diana Nyad, The Gulf Stream and the Olympic Swimming Marathon 10K Champion" in 2013.

Below is a graph of the speed of Diana Nyad during her 53 hour, 103 mile swim from Cuba to Florida.

The red line is the average speed of the 2012 Olympic 10K Open Water Swimming Gold Medallist. Her name, because I'm sure you've never heard of her, is Eva Risztov. She is from Hungary.

Here is a photo of 27-year old Olympic Champion, Eva...

Here is a photo of 64-year old Diana Nyad...

Both look amazing, don't they?

From the graph above, Diana, after her first 27 hours of swimming, swam for a period of about 15 hours at or better than Eva's average speed (which she only managed to sustain for 2 hours).

Here is a video of Eva and her Olympic friends swimming at 5km/hour.

Here is a video of Diana for period of time she was supposedly swimming at a speed of 6km/hour.

There are two possible explanations:

1. Diana cheated.

2. The Gulf Stream is awesome.