First, start in Cape Verde and go to Trinidad, conveniently cutting down on the approximately 2,500-mile trip by a few hundred miles. Second, spend most of the trip in a boat, not swimming, cutting the voyage by another 1,700 miles or so. Third, accidentally inflate the claims in defiance of common sense–if Jennifer Figge had really swum all that way in only 25 days, she'd have to pretty much have a motor. Or a boat. Which she did.
Our swimmer fooled the AP, who reported the whole thing, complete with theatrical melodrama: "My dog doesn't know where I am," she told The Associated Press on Saturday by phone. "It's time for me to get back home to Hank."
To be fair, what Figge did was no small feat, even if the estimates of 250 miles worth of swimming are the truth. But the hyping turned it into something much bigger. All of this eventually led to corrections, one by Figge ("I never intended to swim the entire distance") and then this stunner from her business manager: "Nobody could swim across the Atlantic. It's physically impossible," he said. "It would take literally years." (It took Benoit Lecomte 73 days to become the first man to make the crossing in the late '90s, and that feat has also been called into question.)
So what exactly happened here? It's the sort of thing it's hard to believe can get reported with such gullibility, but then again, people flocked to a press conference last year to see claims of a Bigfoot body in a freezer that turned out to be nothing but some bad photos and a rubber suit, and they believed Ari Fleischer and Scott McLellan for years while being fed whoppers that beggared belief and clashed with reality.
I think I'm going to go out this evening and walk over Mount Tom using only one leg and the aid of my pet bunyip, all from the convenience of my driveway, then call up the AP.
