Biography
Tatyana McFadden was born in the Russian city of St. Petersburg with spina bifida, a congenital disorder that paralyzed from the waist down. Her birth mother abandoned her in an orphanage that was too poor to afford a wheelchair for her, so she walked on her hands for the first six years of her life. The doctors told her she was so sick that she had very little time to live. There she was seen by Deborah McFadden, who was visiting Russia as a commissioner of disabilities for the US Health Department. She adopted her as a single mother, and took her to a new life in Baltimore.
To strengthen her, McFadden took up a variety of sports: first swimming, then gymnastics, wheelchair basketball, sled hockey, and track and field. McFadden is currently attending the University of Illinois studying for a degree in Human Development and Family Studies, and is on the University of Illinois Wheelchair Basketball team. But it is in racing that she has made her fame.
Read more about this topic: Tatyana Mc Fadden
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
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“Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”
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