Local Olympic Spotlight: Christina Epps, Morristown, NJ – US Track & Field

Christina Epps (Photo by Patrick Smith/Getty Images)

Christina Epps qualified for the U.S. Olympic Team after finishing second in the Trials behind Mount Olive native Keturah Orji, posting a career best jump.

Epps is relatively new to the international jumping scene, having only competed in three international competitions. Her best international finish was only seventh at the Pan-Am games in 2015. This year in the Indoor World Championships, she finished tenth overall. In 2015, she also won the triple jump event at Penn Relays. She is the second best American woman in the triple jump, only behind fellow Morris County native Keturah Orji, making the top jumpers from New Jersey.

She came very close to not even making it to Rio. Coming up on her fifth of six jumps, Epps still hadn’t hit the Olympic qualifying mark of 14.15m, and her career best at the time was only 14.09m. It was then, on her fifth jump, that she mustered her strength to hit a personal best, 14.17, enough to make it to Rio, and good enough for second place in the competition.

It is very unlikely that Epps is going to come home from Rio with a medal in hand. Despite jumping the best marks of her career, she is still nowhere close to the level that she needs to be in order to join the world’s elite triple jumpers.  Her personal best was barely enough to punch her ticket to the Olympics, so it’s unlikely that she can continue to excel enough to make the podium. However, if she continues to develop the way she has recently, she could develop into one of the more feared jumpers heading towards Tokyo in 2020.

If an American woman is going to break the American medal drought, with no American woman medaling since the event debuted in 1996, it will be fellow New Jersey native Orji, and not Epps. Her steep upward trajectory is taking her to bigger and better things, but Epps isn’t ready for the podium just yet.

After graduating from high school in Morristown, New Jersey, Epps attended Coppin State as a volleyball and track star. After tearing her ACL in 2012, she gave up on volleyball and focused on track and field full time. Her jumps in the Trials made her the first ever Olympian in the history of that college. She currently trains with the Garden State Track Club.