Feature Story On Senior Long Jumper Ochuko Ekpere
4/18/2001 12:00:00 AM | Track & Field
April 18, 2001
Ochuko Ekpere is pursuing his undergraduate degree in nuclear medicine, one of the most difficult and time-consuming disciplines offered at the University of Missouri. He is a competitive Division I athlete. Oh, and he was born in Nigeria.
Despite the great resume-builders and another factoid worth mentioning at parties, his biggest accomplishment on this particular day: sleeping until noon.
Though his achievements are impressive, Ekpere is quick to shun praise and point to others' roles in them. He didn't join the track team as a young child and become and long jump and triple jump star overnight. In fact, he struggled as a fifth-grade cross country runner. The coach had noticed him at his Canadian middle school's field day and asked him to join the team. Ekpere didn't think anything of going from no serious training to running 3 to 4 kilometers a day. The sudden change in his exercise regimen brought on headaches and so at one meet he chose to participate in a standing long jump rather than run.
"Despite the struggle, I'm glad I ran cross country," said Ekpere. "I don't think I'd appreciate it if I hadn't. The next year I started long jumping.
"I thought, and other people think, `track, anybody can run track.' But there's so much more to it. Your body takes such a beating, but you can't expect to go anywhere in life without work. Raw talent can only get you so far. You have to put in time, you have to devote yourself. There are days where you don't feel like practicing or Coach has a workout you don't want to do. In order to get where you need to be, you have to put work into it. I think that's one of the greatest things you can try and do, but you can't achieve anything. Plus, I enjoy it. You can never be the fastest, the strongest, and with every track meet there's the challenge to be the best."
Ekpere has risen to that challenge on more than one occasion, with 2 outdoor top-10 finishes in the long jump as a junior, including a third place finish at the Tigers' own Missouri Invitational, where he jumped 22-7.75. His efforts, though, did not come without great trials.
At the beginning of his teenage years, Ekpere shot up in height but his legs grew faster than the rest of his body. This proved to be a serious problem during his sophomore year at MU, where a knee-sleeve fracture resulted in immobilization. The tendons in the area started to wear away and there was a noticeable difference when he began to jump again last year.
"It just wasn't the same," Ekpere recalled. "I was jumping with pain. I had to quit at the end of my junior year indoor season. I tried to make a comeback at the end of the outdoor season and make a push for conference."
Ekpere took more time off over the summer but wasn't able to build up his quad muscles, which are essential to jumping, because most of those exercises would have reaggravated the knee injury.
"With a lot of help from the trainers I got to the point where, as long as my quad muscles aren't sore, I'm OK, but if my quad muscles start to hurt I can't do anything. I go into the training room for help but the problem is finding the time to go in."
Spare time is a rarely found luxury for Ekpere, who spends all day Monday and Wednesday in class, divides his time between clinicals, practice, and class again on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and manages to squeeze in another practice Friday afternoons.
"My schedule won't allow me to cook, so I have the worst diet anyone has ever seen," Ekpere explains. "I eat junk food all time. For the last 3 weeks, I've been eating McDonald's non-stop. It hasn't bothered me yet, so I think when it does, I'll worry about it."
Ekpere has plenty in front of him without having to worry about nutrition. He has post-graduation plans to attend the University of Texas at Austin for grad school and get his Ph.D. His father, himself a medical physicist, suggested Ekpere take a year off from the constant workload of school.
"That's why I'm so excited I slept in until noon," he said. "I can't remember the last time I got to."
A year off would allow him to take a job in nuclear medicine where he can start off earning $32,000. Nuclear medicine is diagnostics and treatment of diseases such as cancer with the use of nuclear substances.
"Say you have a heart attack," Ekpere reasons. "We have to check your heart. You come in and we inject you with a radio tracer. An x-ray shoots through your body and it will expose bones. In nuclear medicine we inject your body with drugs. Whatever body part we're imaging, certain drugs go to that part. We'll put a camera in front of you and then gamma rays will shoot through and we'll image your heart. It's the only test that looks at function. CAT's and MRI's look at structure, they can only tell you that something's wrong. With nuclear medicine you can see your heart fill with blood and empty."
Ekpere chose the field because it is good preparation for medical physics, in which he hopes to follow his father's footsteps. Academics, however, weren't the only focus of his decision to attend MU.
"I came here for track, too," he said. "I'd heard a lot of good things about Coach (Rick) McGuire. Brian, our jump coach at the time, was still jumping. At one time he was number four in the world. Our new jump coach (Matt Candrl) love coaching, too. I've never seen someone with such enthusiasm about coaching. He's a little kid every time he's coaching. He's just so excited about it. It makes you want to do more.
Ekpere gives McGuire credit, too, for running a program that understands the mindset of an athlete.
"McGuire is one of those coaches that will never tell you `good luck,' he'll tell you to have fun. You spend all your time working in practice, but by the time the meet comes, you're ready to go out and have fun. He does all that psychological stuff to make you believe in yourself. There aren't many places where a coach cares about the whole outcome."
From outside the track world, Ekpere lists his parents as his role models.
"Their sacrifice to get me where I'm at right now has taught me so much. They've taught me little things to get me through and I don't think I'd be where I'm at if it weren't for those little things. I think they're by far the most supportive people in my life."
Ekpere's father is a former professional soccer player from Nigeria who moved to Denver to attend medical school. While playing soccer, he made a deal that when he was done playing the team would pay for his education. From there, he got his first job in Wichita and after that moved the his wife and 5 children to Canada, which is where Ochuko experienced his infamous and short-lived cross country days. His father's desire to move back to the United States landed them in Quincy, Ill., at the start of Ochuko's high school career, where Ochuko played football, basketball, and club soccer.
Athletic ability runs in the family. Ochuko's mother was also a track athlete, and his older sister was an all-state hurdler and triple jumper. His brother is a former member of the Kansas football team and he has 2 younger sisters who are still in high school.
"I still play basketball all the time," Ekpere admits with a grin. "I love basketball. The coaches don't like, they don't appreciate it because of the injury factor. But that's the way I am, I like to be active."
And all these activities have taught Ekpere a thing or two about life.
"Along the way I've learned determination and that nothing is impossible. If you're thankful for the things you have, you'll never, ever come up with something you can't achieve. If you believe in yourself and don't listen to people who say, `you can't do this, you can't do that,' and if you set your own goals, there's nothing more fulfilling than reaching that goal. If I want to hit 50 feet in the triple, once I hit that goal that's like the greatest thing in the world. The pursuit to get there and the determination, that goes without saying that's one of the most important qualities not only in track, but in life."
