This is Deji Ogeyingbo’s interview with Rosemary Chukwuma, her early season fast sprints, and her future in the NCAA Indoors.
Rosemary Chukwuma: Perseverance and Patience put the Nigerian in Pole position to win the NCAA title in 2023
There isn’t one route to achieving success in life. Sport is a subset of it and it even gets put on a pedestal considering the randomness of what it takes for an athlete to achieve greatness or in this case, reach their target goal. Competition, injury, environment, and coaching are some of the factors that determine how good and quickly an athlete can attain the level of success the sport has set for him or her.
In athletics, the barometer is fairly simple. You win a race, and you become a champion. If you win consistently, you are on the path to greatness. You break a record, and you’ve reached the unchartered territory. There are grades and levels to it too. Some skip steps, others’ progression can be meteoric, while most are usually gradual.
Nigerian and Texas Tech Sprinter, Rosemary Chukwuma will most likely be categorized among the latter. She isn’t the special talent that has made the sprinting world hold its breath, but her progress has been of little drops becoming a mighty ocean. As they say, it’s the small steps that matter. But more importantly, in a sport like athletics in which sprinting deals with fine margin, sometimes, there is that element of luck needed.
Chukwuma had a fair dig at the Nigerian athletics scenery for about three years before her sojourn to the United States in late 2019. Her numbers were not sterling, but she was a stern and consistent competitor. Although she was still a youth athlete in 2018, she found a way of ruffling feathers in senior competitions.
The Texas Tech sophomore made her international bow for Nigeria at the 2018 Commonwealth Games in Gold Coast, forming a part of the Nigerian quartet that included Tobi Amusan, Blessing Okagbare, and Joy Udo-Gabriel to win Bronze for her country. It was the start of big things to come.
It was almost as if Okagbare and Amusan took her under her wings as seen at the African Championships in Asaba in 2018 when they all combined to pick Gold for Nigerian in the women’s 4x100m. The signs were looking good for Chukwuma.
Perhaps it was her first two gold medals in the 100m and 200m at the African Youth Games in the summer of 2018…
CLICK HERE to Read the Full Original Article at runblogrun…