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Ekon's Idols (Part 3) - rrf_1 - 2026-08-24 Onwa Ayo “Onwa” – Born in Lagos, Nigeria My older sister and an ophthalmologist in training Always working on number games and puzzles, my sister Onwa is a very analytical person.  She is strategic, practical, and reasonable, and although my family has learned not to ask her questions relating to probability or logic unless we are prepared for a very thorough reply back, we all value her rational thinking.  It definitely balances out my more sensitive side, but that doesn’t mean Onwa lacks a sensitive side herself.  She actually struggled the most with our emigration from Nigeria, not prepared for life to take on a totally different rhythm beyond just new language and food.  Her analytical roadmap of the world no longer served much use in the Canary Islands, but she learned to manage challenges without resorting straight to logic.  We grew together because of it, and she is now more sentimental, even keeping a secret binder of pressed leaves from the places she’s lived. She is also pretty resilient when her strategy for her life doesn’t go exactly the way she calculated.  Her path to becoming a doctor has evolved a lot as a result of setbacks, like struggling with anatomy class in college or getting rejected from her top choice medical school.  She just pivoted to focus on ophthalmology only and enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh instead, fully embracing her new plan.  Eyes require extreme mathematical precision to examine and treat, so it seems like a good fit anyway.  Her specialty is in retinal imaging, where the scans conceal deeper patterns of subtle abnormalities that resemble the puzzles she has always loved more than anything. One thing that inspires me most about Onwa is her decisiveness and clarity of purpose.  Pursuing a career in medicine is an idea that started at a really young age for her, primarily inspired by our mom’s nursing night shifts before we moved to Tenerife.  She has always stayed committed to that goal without any distraction.  Meanwhile, I didn’t decide to pursue professional football until halfway through college, and I still wonder whether my decision was the right one, even after finding some early success in Cairo City.  I hope I can grow my confidence and certainty in my decisions like Onwa. It is funny to remember that Onwa has absolutely no interest in sports.  She still supports me in my quest for glory, but she doesn’t get what makes football entertaining in the slightest, or why someone would want to make playing it their full time job.  At least she has found a way to keep matches interesting for herself.  She doesn’t understand football concepts like offensive schemes or set pieces, but she can see the shot distance, the ball speed, and the positional grid of players without any technical knowledge, and with this graphical snapshot of the play, she computes the xg value for each shot attempt during matches.  Unfortunately, her assessment usually backfires… “Hey Ekon, your 0.12 xg and 0.06 xg goals to start season 26 that the experts were calling ‘unbelievable’ and ‘impossible’ were really more like 0.7 xg and 0.6 xg – there really wasn’t anything in your way”.  Thank you for that reality check, Onwa.  And yes, she really insists she doesn’t like football despite how much she gets into the stats.  Her bruises to my ego aside, I do appreciate that she calls it how she sees it, and her criticism is never with the intent to degrade.  Besides, her analytical eye also works in my favor sometimes.  Onwa can easily dismantle any claim from my critics with a fully-coherent, inarguable rebuttal.  The media hates when she is around, but I couldn’t be who I am today without her.