MIAMI, (Reuters) – U.S. long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad has agreed to turn over all her navigation data and official observer logs on her record-breaking swim from Cuba to southern Florida last week, after skeptics raised questions about the grueling crossing.
“I think it will be more than enough to settle the question, did she swim from A to B?” Steven Munatones, a California-based chief administrator of the International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame, said on Wednesday.
But he said some swimmers still had “more nuanced questions of how she swam from A to B.”
A triumphant Nyad, 64, staggered ashore in Key West, Florida, on Sept. 2, after having swum about 53 hours, to become the first person to complete the treacherous 110-mile (177 km) crossing without a shark cage.
Nyad’s success came at the fifth attempt and the highly publicized crossing sparked a social media debate about whether her journey meets the requirements to break the world record.
“I swam … in squeaky-clean, ethical fashion,” Nyad told a conference call late on Tuesday with a dozen fellow marathon swimmers, some of whom have publicly questioned aspects of her feat.
“I honored the rules,” Nyad added.
“A lot of the big picture questions were answered,” said Evan Morrison, a San Francisco-based marathon swimmer and corporate data analyst, who was on the call.
During that call, she appeared to satisfy other marathon swimmers with her explanation that ocean currents had helped quicken her pace during a section of the swim. But there was still disagreement over how Nyad’s swim would be categorized in the record books.
Marathon swimming, a rapidly growing sport that was added to the Olympic Games in 2008, does not have an international governing body, so “community consensus,” among swimmers was key, said Morrison. It was not clear when or how that would be decided.
Some swimmers wanted Nyad to recognize that it had been an “assisted swim” due to her use of a body suit and face mask to protect her from deadly box jellyfish stings, in contravention of the century-old English Channel Rules for marathon swimmers.
Nyad said in the conference call that she nearly died from lethal box jellyfish stings during her 2011 attempt at the Cuba-Florida crossing. She called the suit “the only way” to survive the crossing.
“I don’t mean to fly in the face of your rules, but I was concerned for my own life safety – a literal life and death measure – that’s the way we did it,” she said.
Nyad said she needed assistance fastening and unfastening parts of the suit, acknowledging that, technically, she was ‘touched’ by her team.
Still, she said, she never violated the spirit of the rule.
There was “never any levity, never any buoying up. I was in the water for 52 hours and 53 minutes without ever any assistance in keeping above the water or moving forward.”
