Ian Scheffler
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.
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.
You took up Taekwondo in college, while studying materials science and engineering. What does it take to balance academics and athletics while excelling in both?
Tunnel vision, which is a synonym for singularity of focus. Great things only happen because people don’t bother to stop and think that they can’t do it. If you just jump in and you don’t question whether or not this makes sense and you just go about doing it because you want to do it, you can get there.
Having good people around you is also important. Many of the people that I trained with while I was an undergraduate student were also engineers. For whatever reason, there was a high concentration of engineers in the Taekwondo club at that time and maybe even still now.
I had good people around me, people who understood what it meant to have to stay up all night working on a problem set and people who understood what it meant to skip out on a social occasion because you had to cut weight in preparation for competition. You have to have the right people around you.
What can engineers learn from athletes, and athletes learn from engineers?
Engineers are canonically very analytical people. And many of the sports that we watch, if not all of the sports that we watch, require an incredibly high level of analysis to improve oneself.
So if you ask yourself, for example, how do you get faster? There are mechanical things you can do to get faster. Maybe there’s certain exercises which will build muscles that will tend to improve your speed. But how do you actually get faster in a moment where your coach is there and she says, “Faster!”
There’s actually an incredibly intense process of focusing on yourself and focusing on all the minutiae involved in all of your body motions, whether you’re a tennis player, surfer, swimmer or runner. Just getting the consistency of motion, and having that feedback between your brain and your body, with your brain telling your body to do something and your body telling your brain what it did and what was or wasn’t right, is critical.
Athletes, especially in the modern day, require a very good analytical mind. They often leverage the analytical minds of their coaches or even their computers. If you’re a swimmer or sprinter, there are machine-vision tools that analyze your mechanics and give you feedback in each practice session and that’s certainly something that athletes can learn from engineers and vice versa.
Do you still keep up with taekwondo these days? Or practice it yourself?
Unfortunately, no, I don’t practice myself. A little bit at home, particular stretches. I’ve shown my kids a few things. But I don’t train. I have once or twice dropped in on the Penn Taekwondo club. When I first moved to Philadelphia, I connected with them straight away. But I don’t train routinely.
When I finished undergrad at Cornell, I moved to Boston for grad school at MIT. That was the late 90s, and the dot-com era was kicking off, so there was a large migration of engineering talent to the Boston area.
We started a club. It’s a not-for-profit entity called the Boston Taekwondo Project and that still exists. In fact, it’s thriving. My good friend from back in the day is the head instructor. All of us who founded it are members of the board. So that’s my most consistent tie back into the world of Taekwondo. I see results from collegiate tournaments, international tournaments, Pan American events and so on.
How would you describe the relationship between engineering and sport?
That relationship is just increasingly tight. I’m a big fan of Formula One racing. The amount of engineering talent that’s behind those races is incredible. You have these machines that are built by different teams and the only parts on them that are identical are probably the tires. Yet they go round circuits where the lap time is 90 seconds and the top five drivers are lapping within a tenth of a second of one another.
So that’s roughly a 0.1% difference between the person in first place and the person in third or fourth or fifth place. And the difference is a combination of the human elements, but also lots of engineering elements.
Sport increasingly is like that. It’s always been like that. But now it’s just to the nth degree.
Things are flipped around in the Olympics, right? Most of the sports are not about a machine and a human that’s attached to it, but it’s about the human, their body and their mind that’s driving their body.
You have to be very analytical and very detail-oriented to exist in a space like that. Folks ask me often about the Olympics. What was that like?
It’s great to be in the Olympics, but you’re laser focused on your competition. Most people don’t care about the Olympics when they’re in the Olympics. As an athlete, you just care about performing well and winning as much as you can in the moment.
It’s only afterwards, when you have a moment to actually breathe and take things in, that you appreciate everything that you’ve gone through. But again, it’s that tunnel vision. It’s that laser focus. All of the attention is just on your sport, on your event.