Diana Nyad
Radio, Television Personality, Celebrity Speaker - World Champion Swimmer, World Record Holder
Over the past twenty years, Diana has earned a reputation as a riveting speaker. She combines her talent for dramatic storytelling with a natural sense of humor and a charismatic stage presence. She never uses notes. She speaks from her heart and her audiences are left both entertained and inspired.
In 1979, Diana Nyad plunged into the history books by completing the longest swim in history. The distance was 102.5 miles from the coast of Bimini to the Florida shore. This incredible world record, the longest swim by a man or a woman without the aid of a cage, still stands today. Diana was front page news throughout the Western world, the lead story for Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News, and many times guest of the Tonight Show.
She broke numerous world records, including the 45-year-old mark for circling Manhattan Island (7 hrs, 57 min) in 1975. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1986. Nyad was honored with her induction in the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 2003.[1]
She currently provides a weekly five-minute radio piece on sports for KCRW called The Score (heard during KCRW's broadcast of NPR's "All Things Considered"), as well as for the Marketplace radio program. She formerly hosted the public radio program "The Savvy Traveler."[2]
Nyad graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Lake Forest College in 1973.
On July 10, 2010, at the age of 60, she began her "EXTREME DREAM", an open water training for a 60-hour, 103-mile swim from Cuba to Florida, a task she had failed to finish thirty years previously. When asked her motivation, she replied, "Because I'd like to prove to the other 60-year-olds that it is never too late to start your dreams." She was scheduled to make the swim in August/September of 2010, but bad weather forced her to cancel; she now plans to do the swim in July 2011 [3]. Nyad’s second attempt to complete this swim has gained the attention of thousands of supporters, including the official sponsorship by Secret Deodorant, which has created an entire social platform on Facebook for fans to share encouraging messages and support.
Below is a video that followed Diana in the summer of 2010 preparing to attempt the Cuba to Florida swim, that ultimately got cancelled due to circumstances beyond her control. (Stay tuned because she will try again in summer 2011!)
For more on Diana, including complete bio and demo video, click here.