Crossing to Safety

During her thousands of hours of training and her marathon open-water crossings, the American swimmer Diana Nyad sang songs in her head. She did this to help pace her strokes, monitor distance, and pass the time while “trapped in the solitary confinement of that protracted monotony.” By Nyad’s count, 210 repetitions of “Ticket to Ride” meant seven hours; a thousand repetitions of “Imagine” meant nine hours and forty-five minutes. A Spotify playlist of ninety-some songs—compiled in 2013 after her successful swim from Cuba to Key West at the age of sixty-four—totals five hours and seventeen minutes. (Listening to it ten times approximates the duration of that swim.) Most are in 4/4 time.

Nyad had attempted the 110-mile crossing first in 1978 at the age of twenty-eight, then twice in 2011 and once in 2012, but was thwarted each time—by jellyfish, the currents of the Florida Straits, poor weather, sharks, asthma, and injuries. At least six people have tried to cross solo, three (including Nyad) with success. In 1978, around a month before Nyad set out, sixty-five-year-old Walter Poenisch completed it with a shark cage, flippers, and a snorkel. His swim isn’t in the record books, in part because he didn’t file for official recognition. In 1997 twenty-two-year-old Susie Maroney completed the swim using a shark cage covered in mesh to protect her from jellyfish; hers is recorded as the first crossing. Nyad also relied on a shark cage for her 1978 attempt.

Born in New York in 1949 and raised in Fort Lauderdale, where she started competitive training at age ten, Nyad made her career in marathon swimming in the 1970s, crossing the Bay of Naples and Lake Ontario, circling the island of Manhattan, and making three attempts on the English Channel. In 1979 Nyad swam 102 miles from the Bahamas to Florida, setting a record for the longest nonstop open-water swim by a man or a woman. She then quit and covered sports for television and public radio for the next thirty years; she also published an exercise book and gave motivational speeches. Her sixtieth birthday made her reconsider the Cuba-to-Florida swim: “To me,” Nyad has said, “life is about getting to the end with no regrets.”

Her later attempts to complete that swim are the subject of Nyad, the recent biopic starring Annette Bening as Diana Nyad and Jodie Foster as her best friend and coach, Bonnie Stoll. The movie is based on Nyad’s 2015 memoir, Find a Way. It’s directed by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, who tend to make films about people who put themselves in extreme situations. They won the 2019 best documentary Oscar for Free Solo, about the professional climber Alex Honnold’s unassisted ascent of the 3,000-foot vertical rock face of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park; their harrowing 2021 documentary, The Rescue, is about a coach and twelve young children trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand in 2013, whose rescue was made possible by hobbyist cave divers. For Nyad, their first feature, they assembled an impressive cast and crew, like the crack teams of coaches, navigators, marine biologists, and medics that Nyad assembled for each of her swims, but the heavily drawn plotline of will-equals-way made my mind drift from the action.

As a former competitive swimmer, I’d known of Nyad’s achievements peripherally. I grew up in a suburb of Toronto, near the shore of Lake Ontario—the lake Nyad swam across in 1974, when I was a baby. As a girl I idolized Marilyn Bell, who in 1954, at the age of sixteen, was the first person to swim across that Great Lake. I also grew up with “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” Gordon Lightfoot’s lament about the cruel “Gitche Gumee,” Lake Superior: “The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead.” I understood the seduction and perilous indifference of open water.

When Nyad reattempted the swim from Cuba to Florida in 2011 and 2012, I was in my late thirties. On that last occasion I watched, on the TV in my obstetrician’s waiting room, as Nyad’s team hauled her out of the water halfway across, deciding it was too dangerous for her to continue. She had been stung badly by jellyfish and it was storming. Confusing news footage showed her staggering toward the Florida shore, having gotten back into the water to greet the press. Her words were dejected but defiant: “I’m not a quitter, but the sport and this particular ocean are different than they used to be.” Also fabulated: “All the mountains have been climbed, all the deserts have been crossed, but this piece of ocean has never been done by a swimmer”—and here she paused, then added, “without a cage.” In my pregnant, hypervigilant state, she struck me as batshit.

Let us compare mythologies. In addition to Find a Way—a phrase that can be taken as inspiring or hectoring—Nyad is the author of an earlier memoir, Other Shores (1978), written before but published shortly after her first attempt to cross from Cuba to Florida. In an introductory note she observes that upon reading her completed manuscript,

I was appalled to discover that the persona of the book, myself, came across as such an overly dramatic braggart…. It seems I am simply not given to understatement. My world view is dramatic. Every minute seems like the most important minute of my life.

When Mary Gordon reviewed Other Shores in these pages, she found it “standard locker-room stuff,” “a pep talk in hardcover,” and she pointed out the book’s “peculiar” timing—as if Nyad “had completely ignored the possibility that her swim might fail.” Of the introductory note, Gordon observed:

There is probably nothing worse than an apology that doesn’t apologize. That introductory note reminded me of a girl in my grammar school who would insult everyone and say “No offense” afterward. It has always been a knotty moral problem to determine if the sinner is more or less guilty for his awareness of the offense.^*

Thirty-seven years later, in Find a Way, Nyad is still not given to understatement. Her team is “valiant,” the “quest” an “odyssey,” her efforts “heroic,” her lung capacity “superior.” If she is self-deprecating, it’s to set up self-aggrandizement. She recalls her adoptive father, Aristotle Zanith Nyad, who “made his living as a con artist,” telling her when she was five that her name means she is a female champion swimmer and that this is her destiny. She also recalls his repeated sexual assaults, referring to them, with uncharacteristic primness, as “inappropriate.” She describes being repeatedly sexually assaulted by her high school swim coach as well.

Nyad’s earlier memoir did not mention being molested by her father or coach. She now doesn’t shy from talking about what happened to her and what she calls an “epidemic” of child abuse in sport. But she also advocates for pushing her experience down, not letting it define her. “I’m no victim,” she insists.

Nyad is a public figure, and she is comfortable in front of the camera. In interviews and speeches, she can be grandiose, hyperbolic; her message of personal achievement is unrelenting, and her stock phrases—Find a way, Never give up—can sound less Olympian than Trumpian in their denial of obstacles and realities. Nyad the film is a feel-good disaster ballad. The best part about it is Bening and Foster, who have perfected the crackling shorthand of an athlete-coach relationship—their banter is tender and comedic, like Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy’s in Pat and Mike (1952). It’s gratifying to see, in a mainstream film, queer, postmenopausal women tromping around in Vans and board shorts.

About eleven minutes in, the film presents us with a perfect body in a bathing suit. But unlike Barbie, this body is real, and it’s in its mid-sixties: beautifully bellied, breasted, salt-stung, and blistered. In scene after scene Bening’s lined face is smeared with sunblock and Vaseline, the edges of her Speedo make fleshy bulges, and the skin of her upper arms jiggles. (Her wonderful baritone—lower than Nyad’s—recalls her earlier Oscar-nominated performance, twenty years ago, as a defiant stage actress in Being Julia.) Mary Gordon noted that Nyad “can’t get out of her own way,” but here she does for Bening, thank God, and it redeems her a little.

While the film foregrounds women in their sixties and their boisterous, bumpy bodies, its undertow carries questions about teenage girls and theirs. I watched Bening’s performance closely. Does she get the length and lunge of a lifelong swimmer’s stroke? (Swimmers don’t place their cupped hands in the water—it’s more of a flinging forward, wrists relaxed.) Does she pull on her silicone cap forehead first? Did makeup get the deep, red, panda-like goggle marks? And the question mark posture of a swimmer on land—did Bening clock that? She and the filmmakers nail most of these. Then, in a handful of flashback scenes, shot with a vignetted, light-flare filter, we see a young Nyad, played by Anna Harriette Pittman, being molested by her high school coach. Before pinning her down and ejaculating onto her stomach, he tells her that she’s going to be a champion. The filmmakers got this right, too.

One can objectively admire Nyad: her linguistic abilities (she is fluent in French and Spanish and also speaks some German), her relentless charm, her unapologetic weirdness, and of course her astonishing ability to do unfathomably difficult, even terrifying, things. But it’s what she doesn’t trumpet that makes her sympathetic. Bening allows more vulnerabilities to show. In one scene, as Nyad discusses the death of her former coach Jack Nelson with Stoll, her façade cracks even as she delivers her tough-guy lines:

STOLL: I read in the paper that Jack Nelson died.

NYAD: Yeah. I thought you’d call me. Well, good riddance. [long pause] I hate victim shit.

STOLL: I know you do.

NYAD: Yeah, he’s still in the Swimming Hall of Fame, even after all of us came forward, said we were abused by him, said it in public.

Bening keeps her guard up a little longer, and then lets the character crumple:

NYAD: Yeah, well, he didn’t damage me, he didn’t throw me off course, I’m good, I’m fine. But then there are moments when it’s like I’m fourteen again and it’s like his voice is coming out of me, and I get so mad at myself. I mean, why didn’t I fight harder? I was a force.

STOLL: Baby. Baby, you know it doesn’t work like that. You know that.

NYAD: I do, I do know that. It’s just, I… I mean, I… He was so nice to me.

Nyad starts to cry, and she lets Stoll hold her. But the moment quickly passes, and as Stoll utters words of encouragement—“You are a force. Swim or no swim, you are a force. Know that”—Bening’s Nyad draws away, steels, returns to a more impermeable version of herself. “I know,” she says. “And I’m not gonna stop. I’m free to keep trying.”

In Free Solo, as the camera pans over old Polaroids, we are told of Alex Honnold’s chilly childhood; we see his MRI results, which show an underactive amygdala, and hear self-denigration in his casual dialogue. “Maybe I just suck,” he says. The mental health of athletes has become a more visible issue in the last ten years or so, but in Nyad such struggles are parenthetical to the sports film formula of triumph over adversity. Abuse is not romantic, but victories despite it are seductive. They find financing.

A younger generation of athletes has spoken publicly about depression. The swimmer Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time, is open about having contemplated suicide after the 2012 Olympics, where he won four gold and two silver medals. (He is now a spokesperson for an online therapy company.) The gymnast Simone Biles and the tennis players Mardy Fish and Naomi Osaka have also talked openly about the mental and emotional stresses of training, competing, and performing; Osaka withdrew from the French Open in 2021 to “protect her mental health.”

This is a relatively new, definitely overdue concept, as is the demand for systemic protection from abusive coaches and trainers. Biles is frank about the difficulty of processing the abuse inflicted on her and more than five hundred other gymnasts by the former Team USA doctor Larry Nassar, who has since been sentenced to 40–175 years in prison:

With gymnasts, when you get injured, your heal time is four to six weeks, but then with something so traumatic that happens like this?… There is no four to six weeks, so it’s hard for us to process that. There’s, like, no time limit or healing time for it.

This wise comment from Biles gives a blunt indication of what is taken from a person when abuse occurs, that there is no shame in not being fine, and how warping the aftermath is.

There is a sorry lineage of abuse in swimming, too. Phelps had one coach for his entire career, Bob Bowman, whose mentors were Paul Bergen and Murray Stephens. In a 2017 interview with FloSwimming, Bowman says of Stephens, “He had a very distinct way of developing athletes physically.” What Bowman fails to mention—and what his interviewer doesn’t appear to raise—are the accusations of abuse that have followed Stephens for years. In 2009 Stephens resigned from the Baltimore club he founded, and in a 2020 open letter to USA Swimming, the national governing body of competitive swimming in the United States, the lawyer Robert Allard, who was representing six swimmers in a suit against the organization, wrote that “USA Swimming has known since as late as October 2011 that Stephens is a sexual predator.”

In 2010 one of Bergen’s former swimmers, the Olympic gold medalist Deena Deardurff Schmidt, spoke to the Associated Press about how Bergen—whom she declined to name—repeatedly molested her over four years during the late 1960s and early 1970s, beginning when she was eleven. She recalled having told “prominent coaches in US Swimming all through the years,” but no one took action, despite the fact that Bergen was “widely known as being a sexual predator.” Like Nyad’s coach Jack Nelson, both Stephens and Bergen continue to be honored in the International Swimming Hall of Fame despite efforts to have their names removed.

In 2018 The Arizona Republic reported that Bowman had issued a statement apologizing for sending sexual text messages to Caroline Burckle, a 2008 Olympic bronze medalist. He and Sean Hutchison, a coach who has since been banned from the sport for “sexual misconduct involving a minor,” sent messages to Burckle from Bowman’s phone in 2011, when she was twenty-four and had just retired from the sport. An earlier report in The Orange County Register quoted from a letter sent to Bowman by Frank Busch, then USA Swimming’s national team director, stating that if the messages “had been directed to a current USA Swimming member, the behavior would be considered a potential violation of USA Swimming Code of Conduct.”

Bergen passed along to Bowman both his coaching wisdom and a love of racehorses. In interviews and articles, Bowman has drawn parallels between training horses and training swimmers—meaning children and teenagers. To break a horse means to “gentle” it, to steadily and strategically dominate it into taking a bridle and bit, to be saddled and controlled. “The horses have taught me to be a better observer,” he said in Sports Illustrated, “because they can’t tell you what they’re feeling.”

In 1982 Bergen took a coaching job in Canada with my local swim club. During his tenure, members of the team earned Olympic medals and set world records. I joined the team when Bergen left, in the fall of 1988. To replace him, the club hired another American coach, Mitch Ivey, who had just served as the US team’s assistant coach at the Olympics. He was himself a silver medalist in 1968 and a bronze medalist in 1972, and he had coached the gold medalists Dara Torres and Pablo Morales.

Ivey had a reputation as a sexual predator, and by 1987 USA Swimming knew about it. Recently I found a clip online of a 1993 episode of ESPN’s Outside the Lines that reported on this, detailing the accusations against him. It begins with the anchor saying, “Neither the subject matter nor the language in this next story is appropriate for younger viewers.”

According to the ESPN segment, Ivey had a pattern of becoming sexually involved with some of his young swimmers, at least one of whom he married when she turned eighteen, and another to whom he became engaged when she was seventeen. ESPN also includes an account of Ivey impregnating one of his swimmers when she was a minor.

It’s not clear whether the Canadian club was aware of the accusations against Ivey when it hired him. But the ESPN segment reveals that around that time Ivey was refused consideration for a position at the University of Texas because of “his reputation of going out and indeed marrying his athletes.” The ESPN segment also reveals that the University of Florida knew about his history when it brought him on as head coach in 1990. In 1993, the same year the Outside the Lines segment aired, Ivey—who denied wrongdoing—was let go from the University of Florida. It took another two decades for him to be banned from coaching by USA Swimming.

Ivey was an effective coach. I dropped seconds from my race times. I loved his attention and wanted to make him happy. He would drink can after can of Diet Coke on deck even though our team was sponsored by Pepsi. He piped Rod Stewart through the underwater speakers. “You’re going to be great,” he’d say to me in a whisper.

When I was fifteen my family moved to the countryside. I was given the choice of living with a teammate’s family or giving up training. I was heartbroken, but I gave it up. Despite the benefits of “world-class training” and the confidence I developed as an athlete at that club, I hope my own child never has a coach like Ivey. I wonder if I’d be able to recognize any patterns of predation if she did.

In Find a Way, Nyad mentions undergoing therapy to address the abuse that she admits “carves a deep imprint into one’s soul.” In The Other Shore, a 2013 documentary made by her nephew Timothy Wheeler, she recalls how she felt as a younger woman: “In my twenties I swam with a lot of anger. I was so angry at myself…. I let it happen.”

Find a Way opens with a pair of lines from Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day”: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?” Nyad comes back to these lines about halfway through the book. It was the summer of her sixtieth birthday, she writes, and she was driving in Los Angeles when Oliver’s “nonpareil rhetorical question flooded my brain…. Right there in the car that day, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Cuba. Cuba had always been the faraway Dream.”

The biopic handles this material a little differently. In an early scene, Nyad recites Oliver’s lines to Stoll from a book she finds among her dead mother’s belongings. A few scenes later, she announces her plans to swim from Cuba to Key West. Then, near the middle of the film, Stoll—after refusing to help Nyad with a fifth attempt at the crossing—hears the poem on the car radio. She rolls her eyes and mutters, “Jesus, Mary Oliver, I mean…” But when the announcer mentions that Oliver was abused as a child—a connection not made in the memoir—we see Stoll shake her head and become thoughtful. It’s not long before she agrees to coach Nyad through one more attempt.

In an interview with Maria Shriver that appeared in O Magazine in 2011, Oliver, then seventy-five, acknowledged that she was abused by her father. “When you’re sexually abused, there’s a lot of damage—that’s the first time I’ve ever said that out loud.” Yet it turns up in her work, including in her 1986 poem “Rage”:

But you were also the red song
in the night,
stumbling through the house
to the child’s bed,
to the damp rose of her body…

I’ve always liked when athletes show their rage. John McEnroe and Serena Williams are good examples; so is the swimmer Victor Davis, who, at the 1982 Commonwealth Games, famously kicked over a chair in the presence of Queen Elizabeth after the Canadian relay team was disqualified. Like horses, athletes aren’t trained to tell you how they’re feeling.

Answering her own question—what is it that she did with her one wild and precious life?—Oliver replied, “I used up a lot of pencils.”