Fibbing fish: Jennifer Figge didn’t swim Atlantic at age 56
Ha! So geezer sprinters aren’t the only ones fudging their marks. Latest whopper is told by a lady named Jennifer Figge, a W55 fish who generated world headlines for claiming to swim the Atlantic (the first woman to do so. A guy has done it.) But she swam only 250 miles, it turns out. “Over the weekend, the Associated Press (and other outlets including CNN) carried news that 56-year-old Jennifer Figge became the first woman to swim the Atlantic Ocean,” reported the San Jose Mercury-News, and many others. It’s already been dubbed “The Great Atlantic Ocean Swimming Hoax.”
The San Jose Mercury-News report concluded:
The article described her trip from Cape Verde, off the coast of Africa, to
Trinidad. After the article was published, bloggers and others started doing
some pesky math, and they noted that she would have gone 2,100 miles in 25 days,
which Michael Phelps couldn’t do no matter what he was on. Factoring in the fact
that she never swam longer than eight hours in a day and once swam for only 21
minutes, the tale seemed just a bit far-fetched.
It turns out she swam about 250 miles in all and rode in the boat for the
rest.“I never intended to swim the entire distance,” Figge said when asked for a
follow-up, which was a few days after the big party and all the glowing news
stories, which in turn had been goosed along by a family spokesman.
Here’s a video of her detailing her swim.
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