Injuries hurt Okpalugo en route to trials

As a 23-year-old still rising on the national stage, Patrick Okpalugo came awful close to claiming Canada’s Olympic representative designation at the trials before the 2008 Games, but the road back to these Olympic wrestling trials has anything but a steady rise.

 
A torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) and meniscus in his knee led Okpalugo to the surgeon’s table in 2009, and he separated his shoulder at a recent competition after first suffering the same injury in 2007.

“Oh gosh, it’s just terrible,” Okpalugo says of his road over the past four years. “I was building up back then. I was a carded athlete. Things were going well.”

The attention on him faded once he was injured as other athletes from his Montreal Wrestling Club such as Cleo Ncube, David Tremblay and Jamie Mancini continued to rise nationally and internationally.

“They were going all over the world,” Okpalugo recalls. “And I didn’t know if I’d wrestle again. I didn’t know if I’d be able to do the things that I do.”

Okpalugo’s wrestling style is different than a lot of other heavyweights because he moves around the mats quickly instead of just pushing forward. That made a knee injury all the more debilitating for the Ottawa-born athlete who graduated from Elmdale Public School before moving to Brampton and then Montreal to wrestle and play football at Concordia University.

“I’m still able to be athletic,” notes Okpalugo, who still visits his cousins in Ottawa regularly. “I’ve been training on it, and I’m able to compete, so it’s good enough.”

Only his second competition back after a 20-month layoff, last year’s nationals were an indication of Okpalugo’s potential. Okpalugo was the only competitor to win a round against the national champion, who he met in the quarter-finals, which makes him believe it’s possible to make it through the full pyramid at the Olympic trials.

“This is what I’ve been focusing on in training through all of these injuries – to be able to put up a nice battle plan to get into this tournament,” explains Okpalugo, who will also enter the greco-roman event. “I’m going there to win the tournament.