‘AGE, GENDER, NOTHING SHOULD BE A BARRIER. ANY MOMENT SPENT FRETTING I’M NOT YOUNGER, IS JUST A WASTE’
mental discipline as a physical one, that the differences melt away.
“If I were going to stand on a beach, and let’s say we had 100 of the best long-distance swimmers in the world, it would be mostly men and a few women. And if we were just going to swim from here to just over there, I’d probably be last,” Diana says. “Now, if we’re going to cross the Channel, it’s getting closer. But it’s only if we’re going to go 100 miles that brute strength and brute speed aren’t the issue. It becomes much more about who can resist pain, who can manage their energy, who has a steel-trap mind to be able to withstand it.”
Resisting pain, managing energy, having a “steel-trap mind”: these are all things that Diana has. Just two months before her final attempt, she watched with bated breath as one of the strongest swimmers in the world, a 28-year-old Australian named Chloë McCardel, attempted the swim.
She was stung by a box jellyfish 11 hours in; it was the most excruciating pain of her life, she told the press. “I’m never coming back. That’s it.”
Diana, on the other hand, came back. Most people who were stung by a box jellyfish died, she said.
“Ninety percent of people who have been touched by that tentacle of that animal die instantaneously. It’s the deadliest poison on Earth today. No spider, no eel, no manta ray, no snake has a poison that is that effective. It paralyses your spinal cord and stops your breath.”
Diana didn’t die, but she screamed in agony. A medic jumped in the water to help and he too was stung. He was pulled out in excruciating pain, but Diana refused to get out. She carried on all night and all the next day and it was only when she was stung again the next night that she was finally pulled out of the water.
“It was awful, awful,” Bonnie tells me when I talk to her later. “I mean, she absolutely 100% stopped breathing. She was dead.”
But carrying on has been Diana’s hallmark. She spent months and months finding someone to make her a silicone mask to protect her against the jellyfish. It was painful and difficult but it meant she could carry on – just like she has since childhood. As a teenager and a keen swimmer, she was sexually abused by the person she trusted most: her swimming coach.
“In my 20s, I had so much anger and I think I channelled that into my swimming. But millions of young people go through sexual abuse. It’s part of the societal fabric, unfortunately. And I refuse to let that abuser, that heinous individual who humiliated and terrified me, to win. People have said to me often, ‘Don’t you appreciate the fact that that’s what made you this tough?’
“But it’s not. Talk to my mother about it. When I was two, I was like that. I didn’t need to go through that. As together as I am, happy, and living a charmed life, that hurt, angry little girl is still a little bit in there. You can’t just erase your past.”
She discovered, as an adult, that the coach had abused other teammates and though they succeeded in getting him dismissed from his job, it wasn’t possible to pursue legal action against him, a fact that still pains her.
A local statute of limitations meant that because the offences had occurred more than seven years previously, it wasn’t possible to prosecute him.
“It has this deep-seated, cellular-level effect and I don’t think you ever get over it. I could sit for days and days and days, and I did, with psychologists who said, ‘Well, it wasn’t your fault’. But that’s not what’s going on in your head.”
For years, it haunted her and she blamed herself for a relationship that failed.
“I beat myself up about the things I could have done differently. My mother died and I thought I just didn’t want to live like this anymore. I just wanted to put everything I had into it. To tap every ounce of potential that is me. Though I didn’t know it would take so long. I thought it would be a one-year enterprise.”
And now? “Now, it has changed me. It worked. I’m full-on, now. I go to bed every night thinking there’s nothing more I could’ve done that day.”
IN HER memoir, Diana recalls a speaking event where she got angry when someone suggested to her that she was too old for it. “They said, ‘Whoa! You’re in your 60s. You shouldn’t be doing this?’ But you feel how you feel. Age, gender – nothing should be a barrier. I can’t do anything about cosmetic ageing. I look in a mirror and of course my face is going to show the years lived. Same with the body. I carry more fat than I did when I was younger. What am I going to do? Worry about that? Talk about not being in the moment! Any moment I spend fretting that I’m not younger, it’s just a waste.
“It’s what I do, what I say and how I live that’s important, not how I look. My looks aren’t my issue and it’s just very freeing.”
She’s always had an impressive ability to ignore what other people think. She
came out as gay in her early 20s. Although it was a very different time then, she doesn’t mention any prejudice or discrimination in her memoir, though she says it probably did have an impact on her career.
“The president of ABC News and Sports used to have a lunch every Wednesday and I’d take my girlfriend, and people would pull me aside and tell me not to. But if you said to me today, ‘You would’ve been the next Diane Sawyer, but you’d have to totally closet that whole gay life and be out about town with a nice-looking guy’, I’d say, ‘Not in a million years, never’.” She’s been single since she split up with the woman whom she calls the love of her life. But then, the other remarkable thing about Diana’s story is that, in some ways, it’s a female buddy tale. She says she couldn’t have done it without her two closest friends, Bonnie and Candace.
Bonnie, a former professional racquetball player, encouraged her every stroke of the way, and Candace had been at every attempt since her first in 1978.
“Honestly, maybe that’s the thing I’ve worked the hardest on. One thing I love about sports is that you can tell what a body’s been doing. When you see a swimmer like a Michael Phelps, you can see what he’s been doing for hours upon hours every day and when you see a friendship like mine and Bonnie’s, you say, ‘That didn’t happen overnight. That’s a garden that’s been tended’.”
My time with Diana is up. She has another interview, so I find Bonnie. She was the one who gave her the news, on the final swim, that Key West was finally in sight. What was that like?
“It was beautiful. It was just . . . such a pleasure. One of the divers, he was on the boat, and he’d done three tours of duty in Vietnam, and he said, ‘You know, I’ve seen courage before, and I’ve seen will, but I have never seen bravery like this. I’ve never seen anything like this’.
“It was something incredible. And that was true for all of us on the team; it was incredible to see her do it.”