Diana Nyad stops dead at the entrance to the room where the journalists are waiting for her. Will she run away? Not at all. She simply retraces her steps in search of a mirror to touch up her Rod Stewart-style haircut. The spotless, translucent windows of the Hotel Nacional provide the service. She responds to OnCuba’s “You look fantastic!” with a smile and raises her arms with her fists closed and says “Arriba, arriba!” in a fun-way, Cuban Spanish.
For those who don’t know her, Nyad looks like a rock star about to go on stage in an ecstatic stadium. With an impeccable suit of jacket and trousers, her polka dot trainers, her slim shoulders and her youthful air, she is very far from the showy body of many swimmers. She is 75 years old and an old age kidnapped by gyms, diets, good humor and willpower, which has never been lacking in her life and which Nietzsche would have taken inspiration from.
If we have to look for proof that a surname can determine someone’s destiny, the example of this woman born in New York on August 22, 1949 may be unbeatable. The world legend of open water swimming, who at 64 was able to swim — without holding on to anything other than her passionate faith — 177 kilometers in a stormy sea, infested with sharks and jellyfish, is called Nyad, which in Greek means…water nymph.
Cuba
“Love!” said Bonnie Stoll, Diana Nyad’s inseparable companion and trainer for 45 years, when asked about the reasons they had for traveling to the island, during a talk in the Havana Blues room with the press accredited to the 45th International New Latin American Film Festival.
Born in 1952, Bonnie Sue Stoll is also an athlete, businesswoman and running physiologist. Together with her friend Nyad, she founded Everwalk, a national women’s walking and health initiative.
“This is a beautiful country, but there is also a divide that we would like to overcome,” added Stoll.
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In addition to having worked as a trainer for celebrities and professional athletes, she is an excellent professional racquetball player and was ranked third in the world in 1984. Furthermore, she is a photographer and art collector.
Stoll and Nyad met for the first time at the Stamford Racquetball Club, where Stoll was head professional instructor. Their friendship led them to create an athletic training company called BravaBody, which included fitness videos and tutorials.
Nyad says that “Cuba is very deep in our hearts, its people are the kindest in the world,” she says in Spanish, a language she learns every day, while writing texts for children and inviting them to pursue their dreams, no matter how unrealizable they may seem.
The former swimmer, who rose to fame in 1975 when she swam around the island of Manhattan, adds that the film Nyad, shown this Saturday in the 23 y 12 movie theater, was the official reason for her stay in Havana, but “we want to visit Cuba every year. We are here, above all, because this is our favorite place in the world for the warmth of the people, its streets, its people,” emphasizes the New Yorker, in whose house she has “a room full of images of Cuba, including one of Che Guevara.”
35 years. From the first attempt to consecration
In 1978, in the middle of the Cold War, when she was 28 years old, Diana attracted the spotlight to the communist island.
Havana and Washington had entered into a channel of dialogue through the opening of the interest sections in both capitals under the umbrella of Swiss diplomacy.
It was then that the athlete tried for the first time to cross the Straits of Florida from Cuba. She swam in a steel cage to protect herself from sharks for approximately 42 hours before abandoning the test.
Perhaps as an act of reparation, a year later she swam 164 kilometers from Bimini, Bahamas, to Florida in 27.5 hours, setting a record for distance in open waters.
In an incredible story of perseverance, self-affirmation and getting even, the athlete, who for decades dedicated herself to sports journalism, took up again in 2011 the project of crossing the Florida Channel when she was 62 years old, because — she emphasizes — “it is not the English Channel, nor the Strait of Japan, but that strait that separates Cuba from the United States,” with all its tragic history of rafters and pirate attacks.
After four failed attempts (one of them had to be aborted after 29 hours due to the waves and an asthma attack; another, because a jellyfish stung her on the forearm and neck, causing severe breathing difficulties), Nyad finally swam a total of 111 miles (177 kilometers) between Havana and Smathers Beach, in Key West, in 2013, and became the first person to cross the Straits of Florida without a shark cage.
Controversies
At that time, her calendar marked 64 years and to this day, the World Open Water Swimming Association (WOWSA) does not recognize the validity of the record, while the Guinness World Records Registry also revoked its recognition due to suspicions by some of its members regarding the improbability that the swimmer did not use some object to rest during the difficult crossing.
However, the Open Water Swimmers Federation backed Nyad and said there was no evidence she had committed fraud.
The team that accompanied her was made up of two experts in repelling sharks without using a cage, but with a system of beeps that scare them away; a doctor specializing in marine creatures who helped Diana protect herself from the deadly jellyfish in the area; a doctor specializing in elite athletes; the captain of the boat; the navigator John Bartlett, in charge of ensuring that the athlete did not get into adverse currents while swimming; and the inseparable Bonnie Stoll.
In 2014, the Cuban government awarded Nyad the Order of Sports Merit to honor the athlete’s virtues.
Songs by Janis Joplin and counting in several languages
How was the recovery of your physical abilities to face the adventure of crossing the Straits after more than thirty years of the first attempt, which for anyone would have been foolish?
I trained a lot for this second attempt, but for the type of sport I practice, which is swimming, specific exercises are needed. So, the first two months were very difficult, but then with a lot of training, with Bonnie, of course, helping me, I finally managed to get into that body condition that I needed.
We first went to Mexico to practice, but the water was very cold, even though I did my routines. Then we traveled to the island of Saint Martin, where the Caribbean water is a little warmer and where there are no jellyfish, which are a danger I always face in this type of sport.
My attempts before achieving the crossing in 2013 were prevented by the weather conditions, not by my physical condition.
Was there some kind of constant, obsessive thought when you were covering that distance between Cuba and the United States? Did you repeat some mantra to yourself to achieve the goal?
Imagine sitting in that chair where you are and only having the opportunity to eat something or other and to go to the bathroom, for 53 hours. You’re not going to have a TV set, you’re not going to have any form of entertainment. That’s especially true when you’re swimming: there are going to be a lot of thoughts going through your head, and it takes a lot of discipline to focus on what you’re going to do. What I used to do was sing Janis Joplin songs and count in many languages. Bonnie would also hand me everything I had to eat with a pole, and at that point I would try to concentrate on what I was doing without caring about what was going on around me.
[“These kinds of extraordinary endurance activities are done at a relatively low intensity. For example, if you ran 177 kilometers in 53 hours, that’s about 3.2 kilometers per hour, or a slow walk. You’re not sprinting. So of course you have to be in extraordinary physical shape,” said Benjamin Levine, a U.S. sports cardiologist who has studied extraordinary endurance athletes and is the director of the Institute for Exercise and Environmental Medicine in Dallas, Texas.]
Tattoos
“Our relationship is based on that. Diana is amazing in the water, but not so much out of the water,” Bonnie says.
The trainer recalls that, as they decided to get matching tattoos with the Japanese inscription Ishin-denshini (communicating feelings and thoughts without words), and as “Diana tends to magnify things, hers is much bigger and mine a little more subtle.”
“When they finished doing Diana’s tattoo, she was crying and complaining a lot about the pain. I told her that it hadn’t hurt me,” Stoll recalls.
“Then the tattoo artist says to Diana: ‘but if you endured the jellyfish and the danger of the sharks, how can you not endure the pain of a tattoo smaller than those creatures?’”
The film
The athlete recounted her feat in her memoir Find a Way, on which the film was based.
Starring two Hollywood powerhouses, Anette Bening (Diana) and Jodie Foster (Bonnie), Nyad was classified as a sports drama, directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, and written by Julia Cox.
It had its world premiere at the 50th Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, USA, on September 1, 2023, and was released in select theaters on October 20, 2023, before streaming on Netflix on November 3 of that year.
The film has been generously received by critics. On the Rotten Tomatoes review website, the film has an approval rating of 86%, based on 145 reviews, with a rating of 7.0 out of 10. It enjoys an audience approval rating of 83%.
A critical consensus states that “Nyad is an inspirational sports biopic strictly based on the merits of its story, but it is the outstanding performances of Annette Bening and Jodie Foster that really keep this film afloat.”
“The film is also a story of two old women, but the focus of the film is not the sport, it is a film about strength, heart, perseverance and the need to follow dreams,” Nyad told reporters in Havana.
“Even though the subject of violence and abuse shocked me as a child” [her Olympic coach and Hall of Famer Jack Nelson sexually abused her from the age of 14 and continued until her high school graduation], Nyad was determined not to let it be something that would forever mark her life, the athlete said.
For both Diana and Bonnie, “the directors and producers managed to subtly capture in the film everything we wanted” and “we would like to acknowledge that there were also many teenagers who felt identified and it is very striking that 10-, 11-, 12-year-old children could feel a connection with our story.”
Are you happy with the representation that Bening and Foster made of both of you in the film?
Bonnie: Yes, very happy. I hope it is what they were able to achieve in the film.
Diana: It’s important to acknowledge the career of both actresses who star in the film, but I really can’t say that they managed to capture my personality exactly, because you have to admit that, for example, she wasn’t as charismatic as I am, to put it in some way without being rude. However, they did manage to capture the essence of what I am in a concentrated way, that is, my perseverance, my tenacity, and I told Anette about it and she understood it in that way, that beyond the fact that they didn’t manage to capture that friendlier part of me, they did manage to capture everything else and what led me to achieve that success. At some point Anette understood it when she was playing the character there on the beach and she realized that she needed a team to assist her and that made her a little humbler.
Anette Bening, acting scrutiny
“She trained for over a year; she didn’t hesitate to play a complicated character that you might not like all the time. And I was incredibly impressed by how she inhabits her body at 64.… Nyad is a difficult character to like and her portrayal in the film doesn’t soften it. It was important to create a complete image. You never see roles like this for women,” explained the film’s co-director, Jimmy Chin, about Bening’s work.
“Her portrayal of Nyad is the best she has ever done, perfectly embodying the athlete’s stubbornness and strong will,” wrote critic Isabella Soares of Collider.
Friendship, anti-discrimination messages and…learning Spanish
What experiences have you had with the public at the screenings?
Bonnie: A lot of people have the same questions, so you have to choose your words because you don’t want to get exactly the same answer every time and that gets a little boring.
Diana: People always told us two things: one was that, even though the film didn’t reflect my friendly side, they identified with that perseverance that I had at that time in my life and they wanted to recreate it. And the second thing was that when they saw the friendship between Bonnie and me, which lasts 45 years, very well represented in the film, they told us “I also have a Bonnie or I had that opportunity too.”
What message do you have for older adults who may feel discriminated against or handicapped because of their age?
Diana: I decided that this age thing wasn’t going to limit me, even though they told me when I was trying to cross the Straits of Florida: what makes you think that if you didn’t make it at 28, you’re going to make it at 60…? So I decided that no one was going to tell me what I could and couldn’t do, and that’s what has governed my life.
Based on creation, what are you doing right now?
I’m writing a series of books for children between 8 and 11 years old, but they’re not published, and I’m planning on writing one called You’re Not Too Young to Start, because that’s really what it’s all about: you’re never too young to start doing what you want. I remember the moment I swam to Key West from Havana and Bonnie hugged me and you can see people screaming, but they’re not screaming because I made it, but because they see themselves reflected in me, in my tenacity. I write daily, at the same time that I study Spanish. It’s incredible.
Cuba, always on the horizon
Asked about her professional or personal debts, Nyad did not hesitate to announce her intention to prepare another trip to the island, this time under the Everwalk project.
“We hope to come here one day with our initiative to walk with hundreds of Cuban people and hundreds of U.S. people together in Santiago de Cuba, in Pinar del Río, in Havana, to connect people.
“The project is about getting people off their couches, leaving their phones and starting to walk and be in contact with nature, and getting to know each other. In this sense, we have already had experiences with around a hundred people walking for miles, for example, in Maine and Boston.”
What does it feel like to present the film in Havana?
Bonnie: Since the film represents both Cuba and the United States, we are happy that these two parts are finally coming together in the film, here in Havana.
Diana: Even though the film is shown in many countries, it will never be the same as when it is shown here in Cuba.
Postscript
Before setting out to sea, in each of her attempts to reach Florida, Diana Nyad always shouted the same word: Courage! The rest was swimming.
