Cox Ready for Bering Strait Swim

Lynne Cox, a long-distance swimmer from Los Alamitos, arrived in Alaska Monday to prepare for a swim to the Soviet Union that the Soviets have yet to approve.

Cox, 30, known for her international ocean swims, plans to cross the Bering Strait from Little Diomede Island to Big Diomede Island in water barely above freezing while a small boatload of medical researchers follows her across.

The International Dateline and the U.S.-Soviet border run between the two Diomedes. Little Diomede is American, where 158 Alaskan Eskimos live, and Big Diomede is Soviet territory, where a Red Army garrison of 20 to 40 troops are stationed.

Cox, who is determined to swim the 2.7 miles from the United States to the Soviet Union, is hoping the Soviets will permit the swim so she does not have to stop halfway across.

“It’s a gesture of goodwill, of friendship, sort of the open door or glasnost from the American side,” Cox said.

She said her swim will benefit research by helping scientists learn “what happens to a person’s body in extreme cold and how to re-warm them.”

Cox said the swim represents “a great personal challenge of doing something that’s never been done before.”

Cox has wanted to swim from the United States to the Soviet Union in the only place where that is possible, and to swim from today to tomorrow across the International Dateline.

Cox swam across the English Channel in record time in 1972 and 1973. She did a 26-mile marathon from Los Angeles to Catalina Island. She has gone around South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope and has swum in chilly waters around Iceland, the Straits of Magellan and Alaska’s Glacier Bay. She has swum off the Aleutian Islands, in New Zealand lakes, around Japan’s Jogashima Island, the Cook Strait between the North and South islands of New Zealand and from Denmark to Sweden.

The Bering Strait feat will be coldest and toughest swim in the 16 years she’s been completing these swims, Cox said.

“Each swim is different challenge,” she said last June. “It’s not like swimming the 100-meter freestyle over and over again.”

In each of the past two winters, a California man strolled across the frozen Bering Strait from Little Diomede into Soviet custody on Big Diomede. Each of the men who took that walk was returned, but Cox said she has no intention of swimming beyond the border without Soviet approval.

Cox has written Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and has had various politicians and medical researchers press her case for permission, but she hasn’t heard a word.

“I think they’re deciding,” she said. “But I’m hoping they decide very soon because everything that will make this project work with grace and class depends on them saying yes now and not when I’m actually in the water halfway across.”

Cox stopped in Anchorage for one day before flying to Nome in northwest Alaska. She will spend two weeks there, swimming daily in the Bering Sea to acclimatize herself to the cold water.

She also will be figuring out how to get to Little Diomede, which has no regular commercial transportation links to the Alaska mainland in summer. And by the time she is ready, some time in the first two weeks of August, to slowly lower her 5-foot-6, 180-pound body into the icy water, Cox hopes the Soviets will have agreed to receive her on the other side.