Philadelphia-born and Stanford-educated Chierika Ukogo first visited family in Nigeria when she was a brand new toddler of one year, and from subsequent visits counts among her first memories the very rustic playthings and environs of her cousins with whom she played while in the village of Upkor in Nkume, Nigeria, where her parents are from and most of her family lives.
"It is very much the bush," Ukogo said. "There is only one bridge to get in, the roads are unpaved, and everyone fetches water from the stream. My earliest memories from there are meeting some of my first cousins and just being kind of shocked how they don't have shoes, along with a lot of the things we have and take for granted."
This experience is in large part the source of her intended profession.
"That experience is a big part of why I want to be a doctor," she said.
But first, she is rowing for the country of her parents and cousins here at the World Championships. She sees her opportunity as the first of many possible opportunities for Nigeria.
"I think rowing in Nigeria has a great opportunity right now, similar to basketball a few years ago," she said. "Nigeria went to the Olympics for the first time in 2012, simply because a lot of NBA players have Nigerian descent. So what happened with basketball in Nigeria, that is kind of what I am hoping we can do with rowing.
"Part of why I am so driven to do this is just knowing people in Nigeria are willing to seize every opportunity that they can, but there's not a lot of places to find and then use those opportunities," she said. "And you could get bogged down in thinking how it's not fair that some people have everything, and some don't have close to enough. For me, this is such a blessing to be here, surrounded by all these people and all these wonderful opportunities. I'm going to do everything I can to seize every opportunity for myself I can, but then, try to open up a door for others. Not just to crack open a door; I want to kick open the door so people can run in.
"If they are just given the skills, if they're given coaching and have boats in the case of rowing – but it is the same if there were more jobs, more infrastructure, less corruption – if you can work on these things, then Nigeria has the potential."
Although she is very new to sculling, Ukogo has been rowing for going on a decade, first at Mount St. Joseph's in Philadelphia, and then at Stanford University. She came to rowing in the roundabout way that many rowers do when her previous sport, competitive cheerleading complete with the tosses in the air and the like, was downgraded to more of a club sport at her high school.
"We became sideline cheerleaders for the basketball team, and I thought, okay, I'm not doing this," she said. Soccer had already started, so she had to choose between field hockey or rowing, and given her height didn't like the look of running around with a short stick, so chose rowing instead. After her stint in high school, she continued rowing at Stanford.
Her international career started in a bit less traditional and more uber-modern way. After watching the sculler from Niger on television in London, where he had rowed for only three months previously, she then saw Nigerian slalom canoer Jonathan Akinyemi the following week, and tweeted to him.
"He wrote me back and gave me the email of the Nigerian federation," she said. As things came together, she started the transition to sculling after graduating from Stanford, and currently trains in Philadelphia, rowing with Vesper in the morning, and with Malvern coaches Art Post and Craig Hoffman.
"At first, everything that makes you fast in sweep rowing makes you slow in sculling," she said with a laugh. "And then there is the challenge of self-motivation, which was the biggest thing for me. I have always been in eights and sometimes fours, so you respond a lot to the coxswain, to your boat mates. So building my own momentum and keeping it up, even when you hit that wall of the third 500, was really difficult."
After the 2015 Worlds, Ukugo will go to the African Olympic qualifier in Tunis in October, where she will try to qualify for the 2016 Games; in the meantime, she has the single to race here in Aiguebelette. So far it's been so good, as she placed third in yesterday's heat to advance to the quarterfinal. Even so, Ukogo is keeping perspective – while still trying to take it all in.
"The first day, I was very distracted by the beautiful scenery; this is the nicest water I have ever rowed on," she said. "Then I was like, wow, the mountains, they're beautiful. Then it was, okay, you need to focus. So I got that out of my system on the first row."
"With the racing, you could look at it in two ways. One could be wow, I'm racing Kim Crow - I just started rowing, this is so daunting, blah blah blah. But you know, I look at it as, okay, I have this wonderful opportunity to get Nigerian rowing started. So I'm not going to row Kim's race because her race is very different from my race.
"And the wonderful thing about having 35 entries is there is such a wide range of people, and I definitely think I can be in the mix, and get a lot of racing on a straight, buoyed course, with a lot of really talented women. I'm super excited for that. And then it'll just get me really, really prepared for the African qualifier."
Where she will try to kick the footboards on the way to kicking down doors for her family's home country of Nigeria.
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