Faculty Spotlight: Chinedum Osuji

In 2004, Chinedum Osuji, Eduardo D. Glandt Presidential Professor and Chair of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE), represented Trinidad and Tobago at the Olympic Games in Athens, where he competed in the men’s 80-kilogram weight class in Taekwondo. Recently, he discussed his experience with Penn Engineering Today, sharing his unique perspective on the Olympics and the overlap between engineering and sport.

How would you describe the difference between watching the Olympics and being in the Olympics? To put it differently, what do we not see on TV when watching the Games?

The easy answer is that it’s day and night, right? It’s like watching a band perform on stage versus being in the band, actually performing on stage.

In terms of what people see — or what they don’t see — by definition it is everything that’s led up to that moment. And everything that’s led up to that moment is half a lifetime for the individuals involved. Depending on the sport, it’s maybe 90% of their lifetime. Half a lifetime of blood, sweat and tears, day in, day out, cranking away to get to that point.

You also don’t see the moment before an athlete walks onto the competition floor or into the competition venue. There’s a lot of last minute advice from coaches, check-ins with officials from a federation or a national association, or even a government minister. Just trying to get intel on competitors, sneaking peeks over at people, trying to see what they’re doing. Last-minute preparations. Oftentimes they involve music or some sort of a routine to get you in the zone mentally.

All of that oftentimes escapes the view of those at home watching. It’s not necessarily for better or for worse. Made-for-TV moments just don’t include all of the above.

Chinedum Osuji represented Trinidad and Tobago at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens

What’s life like in the Olympic Village? 

When I competed, it was 2004, and 9/11 was a fresh memory, so security was a big concern. I think that it’s an even bigger concern now. And so you have to navigate that almost every day, traversing particular checkpoints.

Somebody asked me the other day about food in the Olympic Village. They’d heard the food is really good and that there’s tons of it. I said, yeah, that’s true, but nobody cares about that, right? You might care about it after your event is done, but all serious athletes regulate their diets, whether or not their competitions are stratified by weight class. You usually have your own food but if you go to the food halls, you try to navigate to make sure that you get what you need.

There’s a lot of tedium associated with life in the Olympic Village.

To what extent does the mindset needed to succeed in engineering overlap with that required to succeed in sport? 

I would say that the mindset to succeed in anything has certain common traits.

I’ll tell a story. I have a really good friend. His name is Dave Collum. He’s a professor of chemistry at Cornell. I was an undergrad at Cornell when I started Taekwondo, and he was a member of the Taekwondo club for many, many years. Dave was sort of a mentor and friend to many of us.

I recall a statement, a comment that he once made when we were out at a meet. He said something along the lines of, “I would take a top athlete any day relative to a good student.” In other words, his point was there is some commonality between what it takes to be successful as an athlete and what it takes to be successful as a student, not just an engineering student.

And I think that commonality is singularity of focus. The willingness and the ability to push things aside and to focus on what you have to do and to believe that you can do what it is that you’re actually focusing on.

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