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America’s tallest man, Igor Vovkovinskiy, has died in Minnesota. He was 38 years old.
His family said Vovkovinskiy, of Ukrainian descent, died of heart disease on Friday at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Her mother, Svetlana Vovkovinska, an intensive care nurse in Mayo, posted an article about her death on Facebook.
Vovkovinskiy came to the Mayo Clinic in 1989 as a child and was seeking treatment. A tumor pressing against her pituitary gland caused her to secrete abnormal levels of growth hormone. He became the tallest man in the United States at 7ft 8.33in (2.35m) and ended up staying in Rochester.
His older brother, Oleh Ladan of Brooklyn Park, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that Vovkovinskiy was a celebrity when he arrived from Ukraine due to his size and the faltering Cold War of the late 1980s. But Ladan declared that Vovkovinskiy “would rather have lived a normal life than to be known”.
Vovkovinskiy appeared on the Dr Oz Show and was questioned by Barack Obama during a campaign rally in 2009 when the President noticed him near the stage wearing a t-shirt with the inscription “World’s Biggest Obama Supporter” on it.
In 2013, he brought the Ukrainian candidate on stage to participate in the Eurovision Song Contest.
When he was 27, Vovkovinskiy traveled to New York City and was declared the tallest person in America by a Guinness World Records judge on the Oz show. He beat a sheriff’s deputy in Virginia by a third of an inch.
According to Guinness World Records, the tallest man in the world is Sultan Kösen, from Turkey. In 2016, he was measured over 8 feet 2 inches.
According to the same source, the tallest person on record was Robert Pershing Wadlow of Illinois, who was 8 feet 11 inches tall. He died in 1940 at just 22 years old, of a septic blister in his right ankle caused by an ill-fitting brace.
In 2012, Vovkovinskiy appealed for help to cover the estimated cost of $ 16,000 for specially designed shoes that would not cause him crippling pain.
At the time, he stated that he had not owned a pair in years that matched his feet, which were size 26 10E. Thousands of people did more than double what he needed. Reebok provided the personalized shoes free of charge.
Vovkovinskiy was born on September 8, 1982 in Bar, Ukraine, to Vovkovinska and Oleksandr Ladan, according to Ranfranz and Vine Funeral Home, which will hold a memorial service on Saturday. Her father died earlier.
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