After months of preparation, four hours of fierce competition, and one Mario-Kart race, Mr. Georgetown 2023 was crowned on Friday, Sept. 29. This year’s champion? Mr. Pep Band, Kevin Ogeka (MSB ’24).
Ogeka set his sights on the Mr. Georgetown title after attending the Mr. Georgetown pageant his sophomore year. According to Ogeka, he’s been “mentally preparing for at least 2 years.” after realizing it was right up his alley. Once this summer rolled around and Ogeka was officially set to compete as Mr. Pep Band, he quickly realized that the talent portion of the night could prove difficult.
“I was thinking and trying to figure out what I wanted my talent to be. I had no clue because there’s things I know I can do well, but it’s hard to find something that you can do that transfers well to the stage,” Ogeka said. “There has to be a performance aspect to it.”
Then, when he was stuck in his room for a week after catching COVID-19, Ogeka realized that the perfect talent to share with the Georgetown student body was combining the very activities that sustained him through his quarantine: playing MarioKart and singing Adele.
“One of my talents is multitasking because whenever my friends and I are doing something or playing a video game, I also watch something on the side,” Ogeka explained. “Like the Subway Surfers TikTok videos, if you’ve seen those.”
In front of all of Gaston Hall, Ogeka sang an acoustic piano rendition of Adele’s “All I Ask” while competing in a Mario Kart race at the highest possible speed setting.
To the shock of the audience, he won the race.
“I got kind of nervous because I fell off the track 3 times in the beginning of the race. After that, I realized that this is do or die. Either I’m going to crash and burn, or something insane is going to happen,” Ogeka said. “All I could think of was ‘watch me come back, watch me get back.’ After that, I basically blacked out. I just went straight into muscle memory.”
Ogeka estimated that he played around 200 Mario-Kart games in preparation for Mr. Georgetown. He kept track of his improvements on his iPhone’s Notes app, where he detailed his progression to fully singing while playing. He began with “some word mouthing” on a flight where he won 26 races and lost 10, before moving on to sing with “full focus” and a record of 12-1, and finally going 25-3 in a dress rehearsal just two days before the pageant.
The crowd erupted in cheers in response to Ogeka’s rendition of the chart-topping hit and his miraculous comeback to beat the likes of Toad, Yoshi, and Luigi.
“I don’t think anybody could have predicted everybody just going off the way that they did. I thought it’d be really kind of hype,” Ogeka said. “Because everyone else was so loud, my piano player [David Yang (CAS ’26)] and I couldn’t even hear each other.”
Nearly the entire pep band came to cheer on their club representative, along with Ogeka’s friends who made massive cutouts of his face for his supporters to wave, and his parents, who drove down from New York to make it to Mr. Georgetown.
“It was very supportive and very nice knowing that there were people cheering me and rooting for me the whole time,” Okega said. “It definitely gave me a lot of confidence to be able to perform and make everything happen.”
While Ogeka was shocked by both his win and the audience’s support, he praised the positive atmosphere backstage with the other contestants and the efforts of the Georgetown Programming Board in putting the pageant together.
“Backstage was so much fun because we’d all congratulate each other and everybody did such a great job,” Ogeka said. “Students did the whole thing, which is honestly insane. I just want to thank everybody involved. I had such a great time.”
Editor’s Note: Ogeka’s name has been corrected from a previous misspelling.
