PARALYMPIC GAMES – His blue and red hair color did not go unnoticed on the track at the Stade de France, and that was the whole point. American para-athlete Nick Mayhugh wanted to send a strong message with his explosive hairstyle, as he recounted in an interview with the official Olympic Games website on Tuesday, September 3.
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“The top of my head looks like a brain. If you look closely, you can see a lesion on the right side that affects the left side of my body,” he explained the 28-year-old sprinter considered the “Usain Bolt Paralympic”.
“I wanted people to talk about it and understand that there are invisible disabilities. People like me exist and compete in the Paralympics. Even though I look like a normal person, I have a disability.”he insisted.
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Triple gold medallist at Tokyo 2021, Nick Mayhugh was competing in the T37 category reserved for athletes with cerebral palsy and moderate difficulty moving one side of the body. The American discovered his condition after a seizure at age 14, an MRI revealed that part of his brain had not developed properly.
“I was born with a physical weakness that affects the entire left side of my body, a permanent numbness or tingling sensation, comparable to what you feel when you hit your ulnar nerve,” he detailed to the Monde last May.
The para-athlete is a soccer fan and could have seen his dreams crumble when his neurologist looked at him “straight in the eyes” and told him that he didn’t “could never do sports again” of his life. But that’s without taking into account his strength of character: “I stood up, looked at her, told her she was wrong, and walked out of her office.”
A change of category and no medal
Although he failed to make it in football, his medals in Tokyo proved that he was right to persevere in the sport. For the Paris Games, he trained with newly crowned Olympic 100m champion Noah Lyles, the able-bodied track and field star. But the adventure did not go as planned.
On his Instagram account, he explained that he had been transferred to the T38 category, for athletes with mild (and no longer moderate) difficulty moving, due to “rumors from certain countries that would have contested (my) classification” judging that he was “too fast for its category”.
In Paris, he ultimately failed to repeat his feat from Tokyo and did not win any medals in the sprint (7th in the 100m) and the long jump (5th), a discipline he focused on after his Japanese success. Nick Mayhugh nevertheless expressed his happiness at having been supported by the 70,000 spectators at the Stade de France.
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