Gold

Karam Prakash

Tribune News Service

Patiala, July 7

Neeraj Chopra knew he’d thrown big — the javelin left his hand, the momentum carried him close to the final line and he swivelled and turned his back to the flying spear. He knew it was going far. He simply raised his arms in triumph. He had got a big one — 87.58 metres. That was the gold standard. It was only the second of his six throws of the night. No one came close to beating him.

The 23-year-old son of a Panipat farmer, an alumnus of Chandigarh’s DAV College, remained calm through the next half-an-hour as spear after spear flew in the Tokyo night. He vented out his joy with a massive roar, only when his closest competitor, Jakub Vadlejch of the Czech Republic, who had hit 86.67 in his fifth attempt, finished with a foul on his sixth and final throw. Gold in his pocket, Chopra threw the spear for the one final time in Tokyo — a creditable 84.24 metres.

Chopra’s gold is India’s second individual gold in the Olympic Games after Abhinav Bindra’s shooting gold at Beijing in 2008. Chopra’s gold feels doubly burnished as it comes in an event that requires the highest levels of athleticism, power and agility.

India came close to a medal in track and field only twice before — when Milkha Singh finished fourth in 400m at the Rome Olympics in 1960, and when PT Usha fell a hundredth of a second short of bronze in the 440m hurdles at Los Angeles in 1984. In 90 years of trying, since India first participated in the Olympic Games in 1928, Chopra’s is the country’s first-ever medal in athletics.

“This is our first Olympic medal for a very long time, and in athletics it is the first time we have gold, so it’s a proud moment for me and my country,” Chopra, a Subedar in the Indian Army, said later. “In the qualification round, I threw very well. So I knew I could do better in the final. I didn’t know it would be gold, but I am very happy.”

Chopra has always focused on big events. Before he left for training and competitions in the run-up to the Tokyo Olympics, Chopra said he had given up on a lot of things to focus on the biggest multi-sports event of the world. “One has to make sacrifices to achieve something big in life,” he had said at the National Institute of Sport here before leaving for the Games.

Parveer Singh, athletics coach, said: “Neeraj had already competed with the best throwers in the world before participating in the Olympics. The majority of his best performances have come at big events. He’s mentally a strong kid.”

Chopra is made for big events. He was just 18 when, in his first big multi-sports competition, the South Asian Games, he won gold with a throw of 82.23m. A few months later, he became the Under-20 world champion in Poland with a massive throw of 86.48m, then India’s national record. Two years later, he won gold medals at the Commonwealth and Asian Games — the first Indian athlete two win gold at these two events in the same year since Milkha Singh in 1958.

Less than two months ago, Milkha Singh died, and his wish of seeing an Indian athlete win an Olympics medal remained unfulfilled. But Chopra’s gold would be a shot in the arm for the Indian athletics community.