‘It becomes pathological’: Report finds ‘no records’ for Vivek Ramaswamy’s ‘nationally ranked’ tenni

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Vivek Ramaswamy has spent years being described as a former nationally ranked junior tennis player. According to the sport's governing body, however, that was never actually the case.

With Ohio's governor's race just days away, new reporting has put the Republican nominee's tennis résumé under the microscope. The records tell a much more modest story, and one of the reporters who dug into it thinks the embellishment says something bigger about the candidate.

Ramaswamy faces Democrat Amy Acton, Ohio's former health director, in Tuesday's election. Recent polling averages have shown Acton with a narrow lead, and a loss would make Ramaswamy the first Ohio Republican to lose a governor's race in 20 years.

The tennis claim has followed Ramaswamy for more than a decade. As tennis journalist Ben Rothenberg detailed , a 2015 Forbes profile called him "a nationally ranked junior tennis player whose serve could hit 120mph." Similar language showed up in his 2020 Soros Fellowship bio and a 2022 New Yorker profile.

Rothenberg found that the available records paint a different picture. In 2002, Ramaswamy was ranked 48th in the 16-and-under division of the USTA's Midwest section, a regional ranking, and he played No. 3 singles for his high school team at St. Xavier in Cincinnati.

Tennis has also become part of the campaign. An ad from Ohioans for Lower Costs, a group funded by the Democratic Governors Association, even includes the line "His favorite sport is tennis."

On Friday, Pablo Torre Finds Out took the claim straight to the source.

"The U.S. Tennis Association has no records of him being a nationally ranked junior tennis player, period," Torre said in a clip posted by the show . "And when I reached out to the USTA myself, they sent me every one of their yearbooks from the 1990s and the 2000s. It is very clear based on these records, which they double-checked for PTFO, that Vivek Ramaswamy was never noted to be nationally ranked."

Torre also noted that while the tennis line stayed in place, other parts of Ramaswamy's biography got scrubbed. According to Wikipedia's edit history, a paid editor removed lines about Ramaswamy's Soros Fellowship and his role on Ohio's COVID-19 response team.

"I just didn't know you could do that," said D.J. Byrnes, who has written about Ramaswamy's sports credentials for The Rooster. "Like, what? I thought Wikipedia was on the up and up. I didn't realize rich guys could just pay an editor."

Byrnes then zeroed in on the tennis claim itself.

"It becomes pathological at a point, right? Like, but you were valedictorian, you were a decent high school player at a well-respected program," Byrnes said. "Who is going to think less of you if you say, you know, I was a 3rd singles player my senior year? Like, why do you feel the need to embellish that you were a nationally ranked tennis player?"

Byrnes also said a Democratic pollster friend who runs focus groups was adamant that tennis doesn't humanize Ramaswamy the way he might think it does.

"He is incorrectly mistaken in that belief," Byrnes said.

Being a solid high school player at a big Cincinnati school is a perfectly respectable accomplishment. Inflating it into a national ranking is the kind of thing that makes voters wonder what else in the bio got the same treatment, and Ramaswamy now faces that question days before Ohioans head to the polls.

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