Nick Mayhugh at the 2024 Team USA Media Summit in April.
Hello, world. Here is Paralympic sprinter Nick Mayhugh — a world record holder who won three gold medals and a silver at the 2020 Tokyo Paralympic Games .
And despite one’s tastes, he’s pretty easy on the eyes. Here he is celebrating after winning gold in the Men’s 100-meters T37 finals in Tokyo.
We know you like this photo, Nick, because it’s on your Twitter account.
And here he is again, looking pretty dapper at an award event.
Nick Mayhugh attends the 2022 ESPYs at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.
Looks aside, he’s also a pretty fierce advocate for disability rights and for Paralympians getting the shine they truly deserve.
Here’s a sample of a few of his tweets:
So, imagine Mayhugh’s dismay when NBC decided to use one of those above tweets on their official NBC Olympics X account and paired it with a truly awkward photo of him.
NBC decided to use this unflattering photo of Mayhugh competing at the men's long jump T38 final on Wednesday.
“‘What we want is to be SEEN as athletes like any1 else.’ Team USA’s Nick Mayhugh keeps it real on what he and his fellow Paralympians really want when they compete,” the caption on the tweet says.
Mayhugh wasted no time publicly expressing how weird that photo choice was to him.
“Touché to whoever at NBC chose the most memeable pic of me, u ain’t slick😂😂😂,” he wrote .
The U.S. Paralympics Track & Field’s official X account didn’t do much better with the photo it used to highlight Mayhugh’s T38 long jump at the 2024 Paris Paralympics on Wednesday, when he reached a career best. The account chose this winner:
Sorry we’re republishing this pic here, Nick!
“Ain’t no way that’s the pic yall choose,” Mayhugh wrote in a retweet .
And Mayhugh wasn’t alone in thinking the photo was bad. Even rapper Flavor Flav piped in to validate Mayhugh’s worst fears.
“I promise I’m not that ugly @FlavorFlav 😂😂,” Mayhugh later wrote after retweeting some better photos of himself from the U.S. Paralympics Track & Field’s X account.
Mayhugh’s path to the Paralympics is an interesting one. He was born with a hole in his brain after experiencing a stroke in his mother’s womb, according to a video posted on his Instagram account — but it went undiagnosed. As a kid, he discovered a love for playing soccer but felt playing was more challenging for him because he always felt numbness on the left side of body.
At 14, he had a grand mal seizure and later discovered he has “a dead spot on the right side of my brain” and was diagnosed with cerebral palsy.
He was told by doctors that he would never play soccer again, but he refused to listen.
In college he was recruited to play Division 1 soccer at Radford University, and in 2017, he joined the U.S. para 7-a-side national soccer team, a version of soccer for those with cerebral palsy .
Mayhugh says in his Instagram video that 7-a-side soccer was eventually cut from the Games but then, in a strange twist of fate, Team USA reached out to him to run track and field in 2019.
“I knew it was crazy, but I said yes,” Mayhugh said. (The T37 and T38 para categories include athletes with cerebral palsy.)
Although he admits his track and field career got off to a shaky start, he went on to kill it at his debut in the sport at the Tokyo Games — in which he won three gold medals in the 100, 200 and 4x100-meter universal relay. He also set world records with his scores in the 100-meter (10.95 seconds) and 200-meter (21.91 seconds) events.
Mayhugh celebrates breaking the world record after competing in the men's 200-meter T37 final in Tokyo.
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