Baltimore’s Pat Downey has faced and conquered plenty of competition in his life as a wrestler, but the COVID-19 pandemic threw a wrinkle into his Olympic dream. The Summer Games in Tokyo were postponed until the summer of 2021, placing another year of preparation in front of the athletes.
“It was almost like a sense of relief. … Now that we know the Olympics are pushed back a year, you almost kind of think everything else is pushed back a year, and you just kind of regroup,” Downey said on Glenn Clark Radio March 31, adding that “it’s definitely something that needed to happen.”
Downey is the United States’ top wrestler in his weight class (189 pounds), a former All-American at Iowa State and three-time Maryland state champion at North County High School in Glen Burnie, Md. He was also a 2019 Senior World Team member at the 2019 World Championships in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan, last September.
