“There are not many people at that next level, and everyone who is is already very good, a fact I learned pretty quickly. “The older I get, the more everybody I meet tells me how great at sports they were 10 or 20 years ago,” says my cousin Cody Klempay, a two-time Pennsylvania state heavyweight wrestling champion who competed at 285 pounds for the University of North Carolina, where he achieved comparatively less success before completing his career at local Waynesburg University. Such athletic deception, though, puts Cawthorn in heady company, alongside a rogue’s gallery of other politicians and celebrities who have been desperate to enhance otherwise-insubstantial backgrounds with a soupçon of sporting glory. On the basis of the available evidence, writer Sara Luterman concluded that Cawthorn had lied about his wheelchair training regimen and record-setting potential because the Paralympics, impressive though its competitors might be, is a fairly low-profile event, and therefore something that an individual habituated to lying like Cawthorn - who had already fudged his dismal academic and business records - would recognize as a safe bet in terms of public exposure and its possible consequences. He also presented himself as an against-all-odds athletic success story, claiming he had rehabilitated so effectively from the 2014 automobile accident that left him partially paralyzed that he was on the cusp of qualifying for the Paralympics and setting records in a pair of wheelchair sprint events.Ī great story, except for the fact that a recent article in The Nation attempted to substantiate Cawthorn’s Paralympic claims, and found no evidence whatsoever of his involvement in a competition in which he was supposedly preparing to break world records. At 25, the Republican freshman from North Carolina’s 11th congressional district is the youngest elected official in D.C., and aside from Texas Governor Greg Abbott, the most high-profile wheelchair user now holding public office in the U.S. Congressman Madison Cawthorn arrived straight out of central casting, with a chiseled jawline redolent of a young Tom Brady.
0 kommentar(er)
