Blessed With Talent, Okagbare Tells Her Story of Moscow 2013 World Championships

Not many people at the Moscow 2013 World Championships could say they worked harder than Blessing Okagbare, who competed eight times in seven days. The Nigerian superwoman tells her story to SPIKES.

One of the enduring appeals of athletics is its consistent ability to unearth talent from every corner of the globe. Take, Blessing Okagbare, for example, born and raised in the southern Nigerian city of Sapele.

She first showed an aptitude for athletics by taking part in street high jumping competitions as a child. Now based in the US she is, arguably, the leading female jumper/sprinter in the world.

The daughter of Margaret and Francis Okagbare, she was given the exotic Christian name by her father. Blessing was raised by her dad and grandmother, after her mother divorced her father when she was young.

Life growing up with her brother and sister and step-siblings was ‘tough’. Her dad Francis was a polygamist, and at one point was married to two women.

“As I grew up through life I had to learn a lot of things,” she says. “I had to be more independent within myself and learn the values of life, checking the good and the bad and putting them together.”

She started her athletics life as a long, high and triple jumper at school, and caught the eye with her natural ability.

Talent isn’t everything, though. Okagbare had to overcome many and varied obstacles on her road to the top.

“When I started to train, transportation was a major problem for me. I had to walk from my house to the track, it was really far, a lot of distance,” she says. “Sometimes I would struggle to get a good meal to eat.”

Yet she persevered. At 18 she landed a silver medal in the long jump and finished fourth in the triple jump at the 2007 All Africa Games.

Her talent caught the attention of the US colleges, and she moved continents to study business management at the University of Texas at El Paso later that year.

Coming from West Africa, Okagbare found her initial experiences in the US a cultural challenge.
“People would get to call you by your name directly,” she says, “but in Nigeria you wouldn’t call people that are old enough to be your father by their first name.”

Though the cultural chasm was initially taxing, her athletics blossomed under the US collegiate system. In her first year at the University of Texas she landed triple jump silver and long jump bronze medals at the 2008 NCAA Championships.

Remarkably, at her first major global championships, she won a long jump bronze medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, leaping a personal best of 6.91m and finishing just 0.13 behind gold medal.

It was some introduction to big time athletics for a 19-year-old, although Okagbare admits she was a little naive to what she’d accomplished in the Chinese capital.

“I didn’t really know what it was to be an Olympian or an Olympic medallist,” she says. “It was only when I saw the way people were reacting did I realise this must be really important. I then realised how much [winning an Olympic medal] meant.”

A specialist jumper at the time, her athletics career lurched in an unexpected new direction in 2009 on the advice of her then coach, who suggested she try the 100m.

Okagbare was persuaded to have a crack and ran an impressive 11.21, chipping a further 0.05 from that time by the season’s end. It became abundantly clear that her natural talent extended beyond the jumping pit.

In 2010 she ran 11.00 flat and secured the African 100m title. The following year she finished fifth in the 100m at the Daegu 2011 World Championships, but failed to qualify for the long jump final.
The London Olympics was her watershed moment. That season she had dipped below 11 seconds for the first time, blitzing to a 10.92 PB. Chasing a top five spot, she wound up eighth and last in the 100m final, and again failed to advance to the long jump final.

Desperately disappointed with her showing in London, she set about a fresh approach to training last winter.

“I love jumping, but the 100m absolutely rules right now and I want to be part of that,” she says. “I also started to train seriously for the first time in the 200m,” explains Okagbare, who trains with John Smith’s training group in California.

“I don’t train for the long jump now. I only ever do one or two practice jumps as part of training.”
The fresh approach worked a charm. The 24-year-old made massive improvements this year not only as a sprinter but also, slightly curiously, in the long jump.

Okagbare set a deluge of personal bests this season: an African 100m record with 10.79 to go second in the world rankings; a 200m best of 22.31; and 7.00m for the long jump on four occasions.

In blistering form she set about a long jump, 100m and 200m treble at the Moscow 2013 World Championships: a daunting schedule of six sprint races plus a qualifying round and the final of the long jump, in just seven days.

Yet her body coped admirably with the demands. She claimed silver in the long jump, just 0.02 shy of gold, finished sixth in the 100m final and won a bronze in the 200m.

She described her performances in Moscow as “higher than average” but said that taking six jumps in the long jump final, the day before the 100m semi-finals and final, may have taken more out of her legs than she would have wanted.

As for next season, Okagbare hopes to further concentrate on training for the sprint events. “One or two events” could be an option at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow but fundamentally the sprint-heavy strategy remains the same for next season.

Okagbare has little doubt where her future strengths lie.

“I only started to train seriously for the 200m for the first time last year, and I was a bronze medallist [at the World Championships].

“The 100m is all about my start, and I’m a really poor starter, so I have to work through that,” she says. “I surprised myself a little in the 200m and I think I can do better. When I train more for the 200m and learn more about the event, it is going to be one of my strong points.”