Life Uncut - Uncut with Diana Nyad - Creating Lasting Friendship & Unapologetically Chasing Your Dreams

Episode Date: April 9, 2024

You might have heard a few weeks ago, Laura recommended we all watch Nyad on Netflix. Nyad was nominated for an Oscar and the film told the story of Diana Nyad, who first attempted to swim over 100 miles, which is 170 km, from Cuba to Florida in her 20s.One her first attempt, she was unsuccessful.At the age of 60, she decided to complete the feat she wasn’t able to when she was 28. She decided to do it without a shark cage. She also had to navigate dangerous marine creatures like box jellyfish, which can transfer enough toxin to paralyse and kill you.  On her 5th attempt, at the age of 64, Diana completed the 170km swim alongside her best friend and coach Bonnie.  This is a story of resilience, defying society's limitations of age and one of female friendship!Diana also shares why she spoke publicly about the s*xual assault that she experienced at the hands of her coach from age 14 in an effort to help other victims not live in shame and be able to find their voice too.Diana has such an energetic and inspirational attitude to life! You can find Diana's website here You can find Diana's instagram here You can read Diana's op ed that Laura mentioned here You can watch us on Youtube If you have an question please send it on it to life uncut podcast on Instagram Join us on tiktok Or join the Facebook Discussion Group Tell your mum, tell your dad, tell your dog, tell your friend and share the love because WE LOVE LOVE! xxSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Life Uncut acknowledges the traditional custodians of country whose lands were never ceded. We pay our respects to their elders past and present. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land. This episode was recorded on Darug Walamutta land. Hi guys and welcome back to another episode of Life Uncut. I'm Laura. And I'm producer Keisha filling in for Brit and I'm so, so excited for this interview today. I'm so glad that you brought this into my life. Okay, so today's episode.

If you listened to Ask Uncut a couple of weeks ago, you might remember me saying that my recommendation was Nyad. It's a Netflix movie. It's based on the true story of Diana Nyad who swam from Cuba to Florida. To put that into perspective for you, that is 167 kilometers which she swam over 55 hours. continuously, without stopping, without sleeping, totally unassisted. She had a team in a boat next to her, but she was in the ocean amongst all the elements, making it across the waterways. Laura, off the back of your recommendation, I watched the movie on Netflix. It's absolutely incredible. It was nominated for an Oscar and Diana went to the Oscars with Bonnie,

who is her best friend. And that is a large part of Diana's success and this friendship that has existed for the past 44 years of her life yeah I mean the thing that I love about this story so much and I genuinely am like so excited for you guys to listen to it is because so I'm someone who I don't care a lot about sports normally and I probably shouldn't say that at the start of an episode where we're interviewing someone who is an absolute sporting icon but it's not the story of the sport that I think absolutely grabbed me it's the story of resilience and the thing we haven't said yet is that she was 64 years old when she set this record. It is a record that she set out to try and achieve when she was only 28 and when she was 28 she failed at that attempt

and then when she turned or was turning 60 she had the idea and the resolution that it was her goal and that she wanted to achieve this and despite society's expectations and limitations on the things that we can achieve as we age, at 60 years old Diana decided that she was going to swim from Cuba to Florida and she was going to be the first person to set that record and it took her four additional swims to achieve that goal and this was in the face of being stung by box jellyfish and almost dying being almost attacked by sharks there were so many near-death experiences that happened in this and nothing stopped her from wanting to achieve this it's the mental resilience that I honestly just think is so incredibly aspirational it's the conversation around the

limitations of age but then also there's another very very important conversation which we have on this episode and it is something that diana is very passionate about and very vocal about not remaining silent and that is that she was the victim of sexual assault at the hands of her coach from the time that she was only 14 years old the reason why she's so vocal about it she's written an incredible op-ed in the new york times she's spoken about it in ted talks is because she doesn't want to live with the shame or it's shrouded in secrecy and she is a voice for so many other victims this woman is truly incredible and I cannot wait for you to listen to this interview I also love that Diana is such a ball of energy you know I think when we talk about these

types of episodes or maybe conversations for me I can feel as though they may make me look at parts of myself where I'm like well I'm just not that resilient or I'm just not wired that way it makes you feel like you're not achieving things when okay when she talks about like all the things she manages to fit in the day I was like I need to spend less time on Instagram well she doesn't do it from it what I'm saying is like she doesn't do it from a perspective of you know this is how I do it and so that's how you should do it it's just she's got this beautiful energy about her that makes you feel encouraged to like get up and do shit yeah and I think for me like finishing this interview I was like I want to live life in a way that when I get to the end of my life I feel

proud of, that I feel as though I filled it with everything I possibly could fill it with. And that is, I think, the true beauty of what Diana brings. Diana, welcome to Life Uncut. Keisha, Laura, it's my pleasure. G'day to you down under. No, it is our pleasure to have you. Okay, I need to start this by asking, is it actually true that you get up at 4.30 in the morning to play the bugle just to piss off your neighbors?

Oh, yeah, you know, that's couched a little bit inaccurately. I don't get up with the goal of pissing off my neighbors. So you say, do you get up just to piss off your neighbors? Is that your motivator in life? That's not in fact the goal. I get up to greet the sun and to work out hard in the morning and I play the bugle and just the added delight of it is that it pisses off all the neighbors. Honestly, I can't tell you how much I enjoyed and I hadn't heard your story before watching

the Netflix movie and then I was absolutely entranced. And since then, I have watched all your TED Talks. I have written your op-ed. I've written, I've read your op-ed. I genuinely just think you are such an incredible inspiration. And one of the things that we speak about a lot on this podcast is this idea about society's boundaries on our age, this defining thing, especially as a woman, that there's this expectation that we conform to the age of which we are, whether that's, you know, motherhood

at a certain age or whether that's, you know, working within a certain type of career role. and you have rewritten all of those rules. Before we get into your story, we do something with every single one of our guests and I hope maybe you can think of one. It's called our Accidentally Unfiltered Story and that is your most embarrassing story. The big one that comes to mind is that I was going with Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova and a bunch of world-class athletes to the White House because Title IX, our law that protects girls both in academics and in sports, was under assault. Billie Jean thought if we go to the White House and we get in and we all talk to Hillary Clinton, who was, you know, Bill Clinton's wife at that time, she wasn't a senator,

she wasn't the vice, you know, president candidate and all that, you know, we'll convince her to go out and pound the pavement and get congressmen and everybody to support Title IX. So the night before, I don't know why, I've never done this in my life before or after, but I let this group of women athletes who know nothing about couture and hair, I let them give me a permanent. They rolled my hair in tiny little curls this way. And you've never seen hair like it. My hair was three feet to the wide on the side. And the tarp didn't take it all. It was flat like Tom Petty. It was the most bizarre hair you've ever seen. Then they all started taking manicure scissors and trying to make it look better, it got worse. Then they put a hat on me, which made everything flatten

out like this. There's a picture of me and Hillary Clinton at the White House where I have my three minutes with her. We all went one at a time to tell her about the law and the legal cases and what was happening at universities. And this is Hillary Clinton looking from the side, shaking my hand. Three minutes. She couldn't take her eyes off my hair. She couldn't. And I've seen her since. She's been very supportive of me when she was, you know, the head of the State Department. She helped us get into Cuba. She's been very kind about my book and et cetera. So I've seen her since.

And when I first saw her, like 24 years later, I started to say, I'm sure you don't remember. And before I could even point to hair, she said, oh, I remember. That's a hairdo that is impossible to forget. It's imprinted in my memory. It was right up there. Okay. Well, after this finishes, I'm going to ask you to dig out that photo because I desperately need to see this as does the rest of the world. You need to see it. It's eye-opening. Hillary Clinton actually said at the time,

she's been all over the world into the huts of, you know, Inuit people. She'd never seen air like that. Diana, I want to get into your swim because it's something, it's a journey that started when you were, well, before you were 28 years old, this incredible swim from Cuba to Florida. What was it about this specific record, this specific feat that drove you to want to complete it? Honestly, it was way before it became something in the world of sports. People had been trying since 1950. I was born in 49. So basically since I was born, good open water swimmers had been trying this crossing. Young men, women, strong, fast, they've been trying it. It is called the Mount Everest of the Earth's oceans. It's a near impossible crossing. So it already was a

sporting event, but to me, it was something much more cultural and personal. I grew up in that town, Fort Lauderdale, which is very close, right up the beach from Miami. And literally on the day of the start of the Cuban revolution, when Che Guevara and Fidel Castro rode on horses down into Havana and took over the city, they decided to take Cuba from a country of the very rich and the very poor into a country of a middle class, that everybody had education, everybody had opportunities. And that was their original, you know, it wasn't a communist thing. It was an equalizing thing in the beginning. And literally overnight, in 24 hours, Cubans, if they didn't want to live under this new regime, they had 24 hours to leave to go to the bank and get all the money they could

carry to take their personal possessions. And they came to my hometown. So all of a sudden I was a little champion swimmer, pool swimmer already at age nine, but already now Cuba that we knew very well. My parents had danced salsa in the Hotel Nacional in Cuba. We all knew Cuba very well, But now that island was forbidden. We're not allowed to go there. It's absolutely, you know, a horrible place and nobody can come here. We can't go there. And I stood on the beach at age nine and I said, Mom, where's Cuba? I can't see it. And she was French. She said, well, it's just this way. It's just across the horizon there. As a matter of fact, it's so close. It's so close that you, you little champion swimmer, you could almost swim there. And I'm telling you, at age nine, that phrase went into the back of my imagination. and later, 20 years later, when I was a champion open water swimmer, that is the swim. That's the swim that stuck with me. It wasn't that it was about the sports part. It was about, I want to connect our two countries back together. When I got to meet President Obama, whom I admire terribly

in the White House after I did the swim, he said, you just showed us. You just left one shore and two days later, you touched the other shore. You showed us that our two countries can come back together. So we haven't yet, but it was, it was one of the things, one of the things besides all the personal stuff. One of the reasons I wanted to always do that swim. One of the incredible things about this though, is that you started this when you were 28. And then there was reasons why you weren't able to complete the swim at that age. And then you abandoned it for so many years. And it wasn't until you were approaching 60 that you decided you needed to do it again. And I would say that society's expectations would probably have said, well, you're 60.

I don't think you're going to be able to do this. What was it about that age and that specific challenge that made you want to go back and give it a second, third, fourth, and then fifth shot? Well, there were life experiences that were happening at that time. my mom just died and she was 82. And even though I've kept in, you know, sort of what you might call superlative fitness shape my whole life, I thought, well, what if it's just genetics? What if I really only have 22 short years to live? And several other things happened at the same time, right about that age, approaching 60. And I'll tell you, I have never, I mean, you got to get

real. You know, when you have big goals, let's just take an absurd example. Let's say I told you today that I've never played the violin in my life, never picked one up. I don't know how to play it. I don't have any background in any classical music. But if I said to you today, you know what? I'm going to take it up with ferocity. I'm going to get the best teacher in the world. I'm going to practice eight hours a day. And in five years, I'm going to be in the New York Philharmonic Orchestra playing the violin. Well, that's ridiculous. You know, there's no background in it. It's not real. But once you get something that is even touching on reality and you've got the guts and you've got the team and you've got the smarts to pursue it,

who is there to tell you you can't? So, you know, as you put it, well, you know, the whole world says this event's probably impossible anyway, but it's certainly going to be impossible for a 60 year old. And I say, who says, who's making, are you calling the healthcare department of America to find out what 60 year olds are possible, you know, are possible doing? I set my own standards. I take a look in the mirror and I say, can you do this? And you know what? More importantly, that do you care if you fail? It takes courage to fail. So let's say I pick something that's going to be unlikely, maybe impossible, but certainly unlikely. And I picked many of them in my life. I failed at many things, but the journey to try to get there, the grit that it

took to try to get there has been worthwhile. And so, you know, the Cuba swim, I failed four times. I don't even like to call it failures. The team and I, we took that journey. And when we came home, we learned. We had new science. We had new intel. We had new contacts. We looked at it a different way. We studied it. We got down to the nitty gritty of what it would take to get across. Everybody who ever tried that swim never came back and tried it again. We did five times. And that's why we made it. You know, it wasn't, didn't have to do with my age. Like I do get real. I'm 74 now. I'm a pretty fit, strong 74. I can do, I think just about anything I did when I was younger, but I get real I'm not going to be playing violin for the New York Philharmonic I'm just not you

will play the bugle though oh you know I'm not going to win any awards or you know be granted into any uh symphony for play my bugle playing I guarantee you well I think Diana it's interesting because when you talk about picking up new hobbies as you get older I think a lot of the reason that we are adverse to it or we kind of hesitate on it is because we don't want to be shit at them We don't want to go through the process of needing to learn how to become good at something because it requires patience and it requires resilience and they are two things that we saw so much throughout your swims and when I was watching the film, Einstein's quoted with this whole like doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different

result is what insanity is or something, I'm paraphrasing. Was there a part of you that thought I'm going insane because I'm doing the same thing over and over again, we're having a similar result. Maybe this is not achievable. Never, because we didn't do things just the same way. And this is true of all major excursions, you know, expeditions that go out on the planet Earth. People try to snowshoe across the entire continent of Antarctica. People certainly try year after year, not making it mostly because of weather, not training, but training too, to summit the highest peaks, Annapurna, K2, Mount Everest, and they don't come back, usually, if they're going to be successful,

just like us. We didn't come back from every cube of failure and say, oh, you know, this is the definition of insanity. We just keep going out and doing the same thing. We weren't doing the same thing at all. We had entire new protocols. We went to the world's leading scientific expert on the box jellyfish, Dr. Angel Yanagihara, after I was stung, you know, pretty seriously, could have should have died that night so we didn't just say oh let's go again and just use the same jellyfish protection we used we'll be okay this time you know we're intelligent you know we went and got the world's leading expert and devised a silicone face mask and a suit that was legal to the sport but would had a crosshatch stitching that wouldn't allow the tentacles to

penetrate. So we went out with an entirely new sets of science and intelligence and protocols and even new personnel. Every expedition was, you know, ratcheted up in knowledge. Knowledge is power. And every expedition, we went higher and higher in our level of knowledge. And that's why we finally made it on the fifth attempt. You had everything behind you in terms of science, in terms of your team. And that was very, very evident in the way that you speak about how this wasn't just a solo sport. It's not like you got out there, jumped in the water and swam all the way there without having all of the infrastructure around you. But was there ever a point, and you said you could have died, you probably should have died by being hit by a box

jellyfish. Was there ever a point in your mind where you thought that was a very real outcome, that you might die trying to do this? You'd be a fool after being stung the way I was stung, that box, it has a tentacle that is no thicker than a strand of a human hair. It's just a little wisp of a thing. And if one tentacle, and you know, in Australia, you guys are familiar with the Irukandji syndrome and the box jellyfish, people do die. We saw a reporter in Cairns, you know, standing out in like thigh deep water, and she had her microphone. And she said, you know in her Aussie accent you know doing a story in the box jellyfish to die and she started in pretty good right terrible accent you sound South African yeah maybe it was South Africa but now it

was Australia and she started in and she was stung right then doing that report you could see the cameraman had her like this and she went down you didn't see her you heard her screaming you saw him come around to the front and he was trying to call whatever your 911 emergency number is and she died She died right there in Cairns. And so we knew a lot of these stories, and we knew that when I got stung that badly, tentacles wrapped around the neck, around the biceps, around the back, and was screaming to Bonnie. I was out of breath.

I can't breathe. That Irukandji syndrome, that venom that they inject into your skin, it goes and tries to paralyze your spinal cord. It takes down your breathing apparatus to anaphylactic shock. So I made it through the night, but now I was weak. Now I wasn't stroking hard across that current because, you know, I'm trying to go north. The current's trying to go east. And that's one of the big difficulties of this swim.

But anyway, I really thought that night I might die. And this is going to sound really bizarre, but I didn't care because we were in something. I had my sort of titanium will, you know, set around my brain before I started that swim. Each time I would say, and each training swim, I would say, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what unknown hits you, you know, on this swim, your body may fall apart. You are going to keep the right arm and the left arm coming over again and again. So I did think I might die that night. I thought I might, but it didn't keep me from pursuing on even that night, even though we were unsuccessful. Where does that mental resilience come from? Because for most people, there would

have been a time where their mind would have tapped out before their body did. Where does that come from for you? And I guess in terms of where you see your strengths, is it in your physical strength or is it in your mental strength? You know, I think there's a bit of both of that. I think that people do do extraordinary physical things. They usually have some physical genetic talent for it. And we often think of genetic talent for quicker, faster things. If you're the best tennis player in the world, along with working hard, along with good coaching and all that, you probably have all the right, you know, white cells that will fire in your

muscles and make you quicker off the mark and make you more powerful in your serve and all that. And in a distance sport, it's a little different, but the talent comes in because your heart and your lungs have a capacity to work constantly for days and days and days without tiring. And then the training comes in after that. Then the mental aspect takes all the physical that you have genetics and training, and it takes it to a higher and higher and higher level, which is probably true in everything, everything that all people do in life. it comes down to, is it your persistence? Is it your refusal to give up? When you get knocked down, do you get back up? You know, do you refuse to quit and you learn from, from what you just went through and you're better the next time and you get knocked down again and you refuse to quit.

And one day, if that's your philosophy, I refuse to quit. One day you're going to make it to your other shore, whatever that other shore is. Dana, a lot of your swims and for the entire of your team, you know, it wasn't just you, but when you achieve something this great, it involves a lot of sacrifice, whether that be in the preparation of the swim, whether it be the actual time that it takes that you're attempting the swims. Financial as well. Yep. Financial sacrifice. What sacrifices did you and the team make in order to complete the swim successfully? Well, I'm glad you asked that because, you know, what could seem like the most solitary thing you could do? And that is swim for 53 hours. And not to mention the attempts,

48 hours this time, 51 hours, not to mention all the training swims, hundreds of hours of 14 hours this day, 16 hours this day. And it looks like there's only one set of arms doing this work. You know, nobody else is involved. It's just me. But the truth is, without Bonnie right there, 50, imagine, imagine you two, if you put yourselves apart by about 10 minutes and you decided to breathe this way, turn your head toward each other 53 times a minute. And you did that for 52 hours and 54 minutes. And all you saw was each other. Well, all I saw was Bonnie. She peed, and I don't mean it in a humorous way, right over the side of the boat. She would not leave my gaze. She was my soldier. She was my dedicated person. She was in charge of my life. If sharks were coming,

she needed to communicate with me after the shark team spotted something and I've got to get close to the boat without touching the boat or getting out. She needs to know if, you know, my right shoulder is dying and something's happened and get the medical team over to help me get through this. She needs to know that if I'm hallucinating, it's not real and I can snap out of it and I can get back to my clear head. You know, she was the captain of this expedition, but next to her were 39 other people, the shark team, the jellyfish team, the navigation team, the medical team, the nutrition team, and a series of boats and boat captains who took care of all those people to make sure they were fed, they slept, they were rested, and they had all the, you know, maps and

tools they need, they needed. So we were truly a team and I guarantee you, I guarantee you right now, I never ever would have gotten to that other shore in Florida if it hadn't been for those team members, all 40 of them. I think part of this that's so incredible as well is that Bonnie didn't have necessarily the experience in swimming that you might expect from a coach who's a long distance and trying to take you that far. What was it about your friendship and about Bonnie specifically that made you know that she was the person that you needed alongside you in order to complete this? Yeah, I love your pointing us to that fact because athletes, you know, soul that Bonnie lived. A lot of the people who had been on my boat before had known about marathon swimming and

they knew about currents in the water, but they had never been an athlete themselves. And so Bonnie, and I think we are the only case in the annals of human sports history, men and women, where when I met Bonnie, I had just retired. It was 44 years ago, April 1st. So we're right at that point right now. I had met Bonnie and I had just retired from long distance swimming. She had heard about me, but had not been involved with any of my swims. And she was number three on the professional racquetball tour. It was very big in the 80s in this country. And, you know, all the athletes, all the good racquetball players had their own contracts, you know, with sneaker companies and racquet companies and all that. And I became her coach.

She didn't know much about fitness. I became her driving fitness coach, and she was fierce on the court. And then 35 years later, I think it's the only time ever in the history of sports, we flipped positions and I became the athlete and she became the coach. But I think that that spirit of an athlete, that knowing what hard work is, that knowing she knew me so well, she knew. And all the other coaches I had before, if we decided to do a 14-hour day for training and it's really me who makes that decision, I know what I need during the year to get ready so that no stone is unturned. And when we're standing in Havana, I can tell that team, I will not be the one who raises my hand in the middle of this and says,

I'm tired. I just can't do it. It's too much for me. I don't think you've ever said that in your life, Diana. I don't think that those words are in your vocabulary. I don't know those words. And I promised my team that all the training. So Bonnie knew. Other trainers I had had, if we said it's a 14-hour day and we finished and we're 10 minutes short because we already reached the dock, they're tired. They want to get off that boat and go get a shower and a meal. But Bonnie knew that that's not me.

if we finished two minutes before at 13 hours and 58 minutes, she knew that I wouldn't be happy. And she'd blow the whistle and say, Diana, swim back out one minute. I'll blow the whistle again. And you come in because we're going to get a true 14 hours. Nobody else understood that, that if you make a little concession, you know, well, you know, I'm not feeling great today. I'm not going to do that. Then next time you're going to make a little bigger concession. Like who cares? That's my training schedule. You know, nobody's there to tell us what we should do. But Bonnie knew, Bonnie knew that I needed to get 14 full hours if that's what we pleaded.

What is your friendship like now? Well, you know, it's like it's always been where, you know, we're all lucky. You know, you guys are young. I don't care what age you are, though. We're lucky if we have parental love, if we have sibling love, if we have dog love, if we have children's love, we're lucky. And a best friend, 44 years now of going through every dog's death, of going through both of our, all our parents' deaths together, training together and being disappointed and losing out at certain things together, all of our arguments and getting

somewhere and coming back together, it's woven a very rich tapestry of sharing a life with somebody. It has. And I don't think in films you see two women as best friends too much. You know, you see men, they go to war together. They play sports together. They, they save the Acropolis ellipse together, but not two women. Two women are always, you know, supporting the men in their lives in some way. And in this movie, they really allowed us to be just two women, best friend, badasses. It was honestly one of the most beautiful parts of the story. and I think we so much in life we undervalue or we devalue friendships especially in comparison to say romantic relationships or to relationships with our kid like other relationships seem to take

priority but then when you see the love the support the adoration and the commitment of a lifelong friendship I think it was one of the not just your team successes in what you managed to achieve that was for me one of the absolute standouts in your story it's really really beautiful to see. Thank you. I agree. And I think the whole world agrees. You know, we are, I don't exaggerate. We are now hearing from thousands of people around the world, from China, from Chile, from New Zealand, from everywhere. And there are two things that they write in, they email, they write actual letters, they send videos. And the two things they say are, I want to be that unapologetic about chasing my dreams.

I want to be that person that Annette Bening plays in that movie. And the second thing they say is, I have a Bonnie. Yeah. I have, or I want a Bonnie in my life. I want someone who's that dedicated, who's that entwined in every day of one's life. So I tell you, every day I count my lucky stars for my Bonnie. diana you wrote an incredible op-ed in the new york times and i know this is a bit of a shift but it's something that i think is so important because not many people ever speak about it

because of the shame that is absolutely enshrouded in it and you spoke very openly we'll link it in the show notes around an experience we're not even experienced about being molested by your coach when you were very young and i don't want to get into the details of it but what i want to ask you is why was it important to you to speak so publicly about this and to be a voice for so many victims who have experienced it themselves? Well, all those words you're using are what, you know, made it important for me to speak out. And the New York Times op-ed was, you know,

many years after I'd been out about this story. It happened to me all through my young teenage years by this coach who is dead now, but he is enshrined in the International Swimming Hall of Fame. And I just think that's unjust. There are people in there from Mark Spitz to Michael Phelps who shouldn't have their pictures and their goggles on the same walls as this perpetrator. But we're living in a good old boys regime still, and the Swimming Hall of Fame will not hear of it. They say he was a great man and a great coach, and I wasn't the only one he molested, believe me. It's a series of young girls at that time from my high school. But all those words you're using, you know, like shame and silence, those are the words that truly eat into even a young, strong, happy individual. And I can tell you all these decades later, I'm pretty happy. I'm pretty together. I'm very proud of the life I live.

I get to it every day. I go to sleep every night saying, wow, I couldn't have done any more with that day, could I have? But there is an edge. It comes out. It gets triggered every now and then of the shame. There's still an edge. And I think that it's important to have words, to be able to speak out, to speak your truth, because you haven't been believed before. Or even if you've been believed, it hasn't mattered to anybody. I actually want to start, probably it would be a website, but I'd like to start an archive called Safe Harbor. And it would be a place for survivors of sexual abuse to go have their words listened

to. They can make videos, they can write things, they can go back in and edit as they evolve through life. Maybe they're involved in court cases. Maybe they've never told family members and now they have. They can go back to their place in Safe Harbor and add to their original statements or edit, or they can drop out if they want. But I think that having your words heard and being respected for what you went through is an absolutely crucial move that we need to do in this country and all around the world for survivors of sexual abuse. Diana, having such a painful experience happen from your swimming coach, did it take a love for swimming away? How did you, I guess I'm curious as to how you remained to be in love with a sport when it was intertwined with

so many really painful and traumatic memories for you? Well, you know, I can understand that question. It comes from logic, but the truth is the place I felt safest couldn't be touched. The place I felt strongest, I'm good at it. I moved through the water, you know, beautifully and with power. That's the place that made me feel safe and alive. So, you know, I didn't want to go. I never, it never occurred to me to go away from the one activity that was helping me at the time, you know, even though to show up at the pool deck with him on the pool deck. And of course I didn't know about the other girls until many years later, you know, when we all sort of do two of us wound up talking to each other and then we found others. And now there have been

others of different generations after us, you know, who have come in with their stories too. And he's still in the International Swimming Hall of Fame. So I'm doing something about it. I'll tell you, I don't want to spend my whole life admired and negativity. You know, I want to do positive things every day, but I'm doing something about getting him out of the International Swimming Hall of Fame.

But I think it's a fair question you ask. Didn't you just want to get away from swimming and never think about that? But it was my safe place. I needed swimming. Diana, before I let you go, I just want to ask one last question. and it pertains to age and the limits that we put on ourselves. I think so many people can be

fearful of, or think that, you know, the best years of their life are X, Y, Z. How do you perceive age now, 74 years old with all the things that you've achieved in your life and all the things that you're going to go on to continue to achieve? What does it mean to you? Well, you know, I am quite clearly closer to the end of my life than I am to the beginning of my life at 74. I'm pretty darn vital. I've got a lot of energy. I keep a, you know, a really superlative level of fitness, you know, going all the time. But let's face it, I'm not going to live to 150, am I?

So I think the point for me is, and it always has been, I'm nothing special. You know, nobody is. We're all the same on this earth. You know, just trying to live the best days we can. but for me, it's sort of unusual for a really young person, a child. I used to be afraid and fixated on how short this life was going to be. It's funny you said that, Diana, because even last night, I have a four-year-old and she last night was crying from her bed and I went into there and I was like, what's going on? And she said, mommy, I'm so upset because one day you're

going to be old and you're going to die. And I was like, you're four, you've got a long time. Yeah, see that? So age four already, you know, sort of a macro vision of this life and the fact that we never get to do any day again. So it became imperative to me as a very young person and now as an older person to not worry about what is my age and what have I done with my past? What regrets do I have? What am I going to do with the future? if I take care of this day, if I go to sleep tonight and when my head hits that pillow, if I can say, I made this day meaningful, I made this day worthwhile, I didn't sit around unconsciously and just let hours go by that I can't even remember what I was doing. I'm engaged. I'm engaged with the people of my own personal life, of my community, of my country, of the world at large. And I'm in it. I'm in it full tilt. And the day that I take my last breath, if I can say, you know what? I couldn't do it all. It was too short. Your

daughter is right. You're going to get old one day and you're going to die. And your four-year-old is right about that. But if we can all say at the end, at that last breath, and I'm so much closer to it than you guys. It's hard to relate to, but I can picture it. I can picture getting older and having some limitations as I get older. I can picture dying one day. I want to take that last breath and I'm going to say, I didn't do it all. I couldn't meet all the people I wanted to meet. Couldn't help all the people I wanted to help. Couldn't have all the experiences I wanted to have. It went by so darn fast, but at least I can say I lived every waking moment of every day to, to the ultimate of how I could live it. That's where I am in the quality of it. Not like,

oh, what can I not do at this age? And frankly, I can't think of anything I can't do at this age. You talk to me in 10 years, 20 years, maybe I'll think of a few things, but right now I can't think of anything. Diana, you are truly incredible. It is a privilege to talk to you. This is the interview I have been most excited about this year. And I, in the more condensed time than what we would normally have, I couldn't be genuinely more thrilled with everything that you have given us. Thank you for your honesty. Thank you for your vulnerability. And also just thank you for the lessons around resilience and life, your joy. Well, Keisha, Laura, I thank you so much. And I appreciate your being very kind about my time today, but I liked very much the

time we spent together. So I hope it works out for your audience as well. Thank you. Actually, we should end this. It's a Friday, so we need to do your music Friday. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I've been thinking about tomorrow because I like my little, you know, if nobody else cares about them, I find them very funny. But I was going to. Do you know Lionel Richie's Hello?

I know Lionel Richie. Sing me a bit. I don't know names, but I know songs. La-da-da-da-da by your door. La-da-da-da-da-da forevermore. So it's a song, it's really about a man who's fallen in love with a blind woman and he walks by her house and he hopes she's waiting for him to go by. But I am actually, I'm not a bad singer, but I'm a really good whistler. So that song has a lot of flats in it and flats are beautiful for

whistling. So I think for tomorrow, I'm going to rehearse on you right now. I won't do the whole song but it goes a bit like this and it goes on from there but it you're amazing you're a beautiful whistler you're an amazing whistler is it the bugle playing is that why now yeah the bugle the view of the three talents actually i'm a pretty good dancer i'm a good whistler i'm a pretty good singer and i'm a very mediocre horn player so people forgive me sometimes i get that horn i go and i go and sometimes i go it doesn't come out right but people forgive me diana you will laugh at this we've got one thing in common i did dancing with the stars in australia and you did dancing with the stars in the states so i'm also

part of the alumni hello how'd you do fucking terrible you should see me trying to do a job one of the judges said that she looked like a praying mantis on acid well as you probably know i was kicked off the show quite early in the second week but i must say that i'm not a bad dancer and i felt the people who win it you know are fantastic totally You know, they're, they're really good. Like, oh gosh, I forget her name right now, but she was the Olympic ice dancer. Oh, of course she was going to be good. Ah, she's going to be cheating. No, I mean, I used to doing it on ice. Of course you can do it on a feet. Totally. Totally. I mean, is there anything that this woman can't do? Diana,

we're going to let you go. We know you're a busy, busy, busy person who needs to pack a million things into the day, but thank you so much for taking the time for this interview today. I enjoyed it. I truly did. You guys take care. Maybe I'll see you down under one day. We'll be right back. We'll be right back.