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http://www.courant.com/sports/hc-riley-column-0915-20130914,0,1664692.column
Lori Riley
5:42 p.m. EDT, September 14, 2013
Marcy MacDonald has nothing against fellow swimmer Diana Nyad.
But she doesn't think Nyad's 110-mile Cuba-to-Florida swim, celebrated internationally upon its completion on Sept. 2, falls into the same category that her swims do.
Last month, MacDonald, 49, of Andover, quietly tied the American record for English Channel crossings with a 42-mile double crossing, bringing her total number of crossings to 14. The record is now held by two Connecticut residents — MacDonald and Peter Jurzynski of Naugatuck. Jurzynski is retired from Channel swimming after bypass surgery; MacDonald will try to break the record next June on the 20th anniversary of her first Channel swim.
Lori Riley
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Last week, MacDonald was on a three-hour conference call with Nyad and other members of the marathon swimming community, quizzing the 64-year-old about the validity of her swim, the first completed without a shark cage.
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"I don't want to bring her down," said MacDonald, who was inducted into the International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame in 2005 and is a member of the board of directors. "I just want to put her in a different category."
There were several issues pointed out by critics; for example, at one point, Nyad picked up speed, doubling her average speed, which her crew credited to a particularly fast current.
But for MacDonald, at the heart of the controversy was a special suit that Nyad wore during the 53-hour swim to ward off a particularly ferocious brand of jellyfish, the box jellyfish, whose sting can be lethal. Nyad had tried the swim four previous times but had pulled out for a variety of reasons, including jellyfish stings.
The suit alone wouldn't have been so bad, MacDonald said. But Nyad took the suit on and off. And when she did, people in the boat helped her. And when they helped her, they touched her.
And for many marathon swimmers, that counts as an assisted swim, not a pure swim.
"If somebody's touching you and there's even a little bit of movement of the boat, you're getting towed," MacDonald said.
English Channel swims are governed by a set of rules, which don't allow wetsuits or any kind of special suits. The swimmer cannot touch the boat or any of the support crew or the swim is over. There are official observers on the support boat to watch for any improprieties.
Many swims around the world — the Swim Across the Sound from Long Island to Bridgeport, the Manhattan Island Marathon Swim in New York, the Catalina Channel swim (which has its own swim federation) — follow English Channel rules. MacDonald knows because she has swam them all.
But Nyad knew she couldn't make her swim — which had been a longtime goal of hers — without a special suit and face mask. Her attempt last year was derailed by box jellyfish.
Her swim was not in the English Channel, where there are jellyfish — MacDonald was stung badly by one on her swim Aug. 28 — but not the lethal variety. And thus, some would say, it should not be governed by English Channel swim rules.
"She can do whatever she wants," MacDonald said. "But the thing that makes it so conflicting is that Diana kept putting the suit on and off. In our realm of things, that's assistance.
"If I was going to be going for a record like that, I wouldn't have risked anything. I would have devised something I could do myself. And I probably couldn't have.
"No one's ever done a type of swim like this. It is opening up a can of worms with records, with the Guinness Book of World Records. People don't know what to do with this swim. They really don't."
There were observers, but MacDonald said they were not well-known to the international swimming community and there was some video, but not of the entire 53 hours. There are some holes in the story. Some of them are nuanced; not everybody is going to understand the difference between wearing a wetsuit and not wearing a wetsuit, so what's the big deal?
Well, I have been in water in the English Channel, and let me tell you, it is no picnic. I would wear a wetsuit (which isn't allowed). Fifty-four degree water is really cold. And MacDonald swam in it for over 10 hours in her first Channel crossing in 1994. It's the rules. No wetsuits.
It was 64 degrees during MacDonald's August Channel swim. The water was pretty rough, which precluded her from attempting a triple-crossing, something she has tried but not accomplished.
When she puts on her regular swimsuit and cap and plasters herself with lanolin grease to ward off the chill, she is doing what hundreds of other Channel swimmers have done. She can't touch the boat. Nobody can touch her. There are official observers watching. It's a level playing field.
The only variable is the Channel, which can go from level to rough and rocking and rolling in a matter of hours and whose weather is sometimes impossible to predict. And that's what draws MacDonald back year after year. That's what drew Jurzynski back year after year (plus the fact that he really liked the town of Folkestone, England, just up the coast from Dover and travels back there quite a bit now).
According to MacDonald, more answers are forthcoming for the questions she and the other members of the international swim community had, when Nyad's navigator's notes and observations are made public. For her part, Nyad has said because she was the first to make the crossing, she understood that she got to set the rules of the crossing, and also that she never held the boat and was never supported by a member of her support team. "We made it in squeaky-clean, ethical fashion," she said last week.
"It's definitely a different swim than I did," MacDonald said. "Hers was different from most people's. I'm cool with that. It's driving some people crazy, but my life goes on."
Copyright © 2013, The Hartford Courant
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