Tallest man in US, Igor Vovkovinskiy dies in Minnesota
Tallest man in US, Igor Vovkovinskiy dies in Minnesota
ROCHESTER, Minnesota – Igor Vovkovinskiy, America’s tallest man, has died in Minnesota. He was 38 years old.
His family said Ukraine-born Vovkovinskiy died of heart disease on Friday at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. Her mother, Svetlana Vovkovinska, an intensive care nurse in Mayo, initially 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 7 feet, 8.33 inches (2 meters, 34.5 centimeters) 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 President Barack Obama during a campaign rally in 2009, when the president noticed him near the stage wearing a T-shirt that read “ World’s Biggest Obama Supporter ”. In 2013, he brought the Ukrainian candidate on stage to participate in the Eurovision Song Contest.
At the age of 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.
He appealed in 2012 to cover the estimated cost of $ 16,000 for specially designed shoes that would not cause him crippling pain. At the time, he said he had not owned a pair in years that matched his height 26,10E feet. 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 is holding a memorial service on Saturday. Her father died earlier.