FAT BOY GOT INTO ATHLETICS ON A SLIM CHANCE

New Delhi, Aug. 7: A plump kid took to athletics to lose weight and ended up being India’s first track-and-field Olympic gold-medallist.

Sounds like a fairytale? That’s Neeraj Chopra’s life actually, all of 23 and a superstar, or dare one say a messiah, that Indian athletics had been waiting for over a century.

On Saturday, with his javelin in hand, Chopra was nothing short of a rockstar at Tokyo’s Olympic stadium, which should have been full to capacity to watch his genius unfold but had just a handful officials and coaches to cheer him on thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic.

He got everyone to cheer for him like he always does and didn’t even need to throw a personal best of 88.07m. The gold was sealed with the 87.58m throw, which was just his second of the final round.

But many years before this moment of greatness, Chopra was under tremendous pressure from his joint family of 17 to lose weight. He was all of 13 at that point and had become a mischievous boy, often fiddling the bee hives on village trees and trying to pull buffaloes by their tails.

His father Satish Kumar Chopra wanted something to be done to discipline the boy. So, after a lot of cajoling, the child finally agreed to do some running to shed the flab.

His uncle took him to Shivaji Stadium in Panipat — around 15km from his village. Chopra wasn’t interested in running and almost instantly fell in love with javelin throw when he saw a few seniors practising at the stadium.

He decided to try his luck and as the cliched saying goes, rest is history, which would now probably make its way into school textbooks.

He has been a consistent performer since bursting into spotlight with a historic gold in the junior world championships in 2016 with an

Under-20 world record of 86.48m which still stands.

His other achievements include gold medals in the

2018 Commonwealth Games and the Asian Games, besides the top finish in the 2017 Asian Championships. He is also a

2018 Arjuna Awardee.

His infectious smile doesn’t give it away but Chopra has had his brush with low phases too. He underwent an arthroscopic surgery on the elbow of his right throwing arm in 2019 which kept

him out of action for nearly a year but he came back stronger.

In pursuit of excellence, it was a roller-coaster ride for the tall, sprightly and humble athlete after being pulled into the sport by senior javelin thrower Jaiveer Choudhary from a nearby village in 2011.

Chopra was game to it and after a few months, in search of better facilities, he shifted to the Tau Devi Lal Stadium in Panchkula. By the end of 2012, he had become the U-16 national champion. In 2013, he took part in the World Youth Championships in Ukraine but returned without any medal. Next year, he won a silver in the Youth Olympics Qualification in Bangkok, his first international medal.

Chopra’s first medal in a national senior championship came in July 2015 during the Inter-State event in Chennai with a throw of 77.33m. A few months later, he won gold in the National Open Championships in Kolkata. The year 2016 was a breakthrough one for Chopra. After crossing the 80m mark at the fag end of

2015, Chopra won the South Asian Games in Guwahati in February 2016 with a throw of 82.23m. Chopra was made a Junior Commission Officer in the Indian Army in 2017. He is now a Naib Subedar. A few months later, under the guidance of late Australian coach Gary Calvert, Chopra created history during the world junior championships and announced the arrival of a truly world-class javelin thrower. —