Beijing Olympics long jump bronze medal winner, Blessing Okagbare, will be the cynosure when the Mobil track and field championships begin today at the mainbowl of the U. J. Esuene stadium in Calabar.

Okagbare

Okagbare, the reigning national 100m and long jump champion, has become Nigeria’s greatest athletics export in the last two years following her series of spectacular, eye-catching performances in the American collegiate circuit.

The Sapele-born General Studies major at the University of Texas in El Paso (UTEP) in Texas,USA, has grown in geometrical proportions from her fortuitous bronze medal win in Beijing two years ago to a real world class athlete who her head coach at UTEP, the retiring Bob Kittens, has likened to the great American sprinter, Marion Jones, in terms of her athletic potentials.
So far, Okagbare has not only fulfilled expectations in the long jump where she won Nigeria’s lone individual medal at the Olympics two years ago, she has actually exceeded it in the 100m where she has confirmed her status as the new Nigeria queen of the track.

In the American collegiate circuit, Okagbare made history as the first and only UTEP woman to successfully complete a 100m (60m) and long jump double indoors and outdoors following her remarkable feat at the National Collegiate of Athletics Associations (NCAA) championships where she won the 60m and long jump double at the indoor version last March and the 100m and long jump double at the outdoor event held in Eugene, Oregon in the USA penultimate weekend.

Okagbare, however, laid the foundation for her undisputed status as Nigeria’s queen of the track incidentally at the Mobil championships last year in Abuja where she surprised many by dethroning then reigning queen, Oludamola Osayomi.

Osayomi had a year earlier ran 11.08 twice to not only become the national 100m title winner but also set a new championship record as well as win the N1m jackpot prize on offer for athlete(s) whose performance was adjudged, using the IAAF scoring table of performance (Hungarian Table) the best in the championship.

But Okagbare re-invented the wheel and reminded Nigerians of the great Policewoman, Chioma Ajunwa, who, outside her unfortunate drugs ban, was a primus interpares in the long jump and 100m in the 1990s.

She won the 100m title with relative ease in a new 11.16 personal best and added the long jump title to emulate the feat Ajunwa performed at the inauguaral edition of the Mobil championships in 1990.

Today,Okagbare is favoured to retain both titles and set for herself a piece of Mobil history as the first woman to successfully retain both titles.In the 100m she holds the pre_championship best of 11.10 (the IAAF however credits her with the 11.21 she ran in Eugene,Oregon on June 9 when she emerged NCAA champion).Her biggest challenger will be the woman she dethroned in 2009 as Nigeria’s champion,Osayomi.
Osayomi holds a personal season’s best of 11.26 coming to this championships.She has also proved to be have the big occassion temperament following her race into history books as the third Nigerian nay African woman to run in the 100m finals of the IAAF World Championships in Athletics behind Mary Onyali and Mercy Nku.