Owner of four (4) senior continental titles, Ese Brume has over the years, made herself a mainstay in the women’s Long Jump, now comfortably in the conversation of the greatest female Long Jumper from Africa and one of the best in the world.
Since she won GOLD at the 2014 Commonwealth Games, she has built her resumé to include medals from ALL global championships, continuing to up her game at every chance provided.
Although she competed sparsely in 2019, for the first time in her career, she surpassed 7 metres at the Turkish Championships, breaking sand at 7.05m which immediately put her in second place on the season’s toplist going into the world championships!
She was perfectly set up for her first global medal at the World Championships that year and she wasted no time at all, taking command of the competition and sweeping to a first-round 6.91m. At the time, this was the third best jump of her career, highlighting her big intentions to medal and applying pressure on the field.
Malaika Mihambo who was world leader, found her rhythm in the second half of competition and built nicely to a massive 7.30m in the fifth round and with Maryna Bekh finding a 6.92m leap in the closing stages as well, Ese Brume’s 6.91m held up for Bronze in Doha. This ended a drought of World Championship medals for Nigeria since Blessing Okagbare won a medal of a different colour in Moscow six years before.
At the next staging of the event in Oregon 2022, Brume came in again as one of the favourites for the title and even though the event was a bit more open, the competition was intense.
She was in fourth with her opening attempt of 6.61m after the first round, but she soon kicked in the first 7-metre jump of the competition in the third round, reaching a Season’s Best of 7.02m.
Defending champion, Mihambo soon responded in the next rounds with 7.09m and 7.12m consecutively, enough for GOLD on the day while Brume walked away with a Silver, an upgrade on her previous finish at the World Championships. Brume is the second Nigerian after Okagbare with two individual World Championships medals to her name.
As the countdown to the 40th anniversary of the World Athletics Championships, along with the 2023 edition, set to hold in Budapest, Hungary, from August 19th to 27th, begins, we will highlight Nigeria’s medals won at the World Championships, which first started out as a quadrennial event, but became a biennial one after the third edition held in Tokyo in 1991. Nigeria has won a total of 11 medals: two of them in the relays and nine from individual events!
