On the eve of the Doha Diamond League, which took place on 10 May, some of the top athletes in the world milled around at the players’ hotel during media day in their summer staples of shorts and T-shirts. Neeraj Chopra, the most-sought after name at the event, however was swaddled in a white tracksuit. A suit of armour against the air-conditioning, keeping his muscles warm and relaxed and ready for competition.
“Unlike the Europeans, we are not used to the cold,” the javelin star said. Be it the little things or the big things, Chopra is used to standing out from the crowd—he is a trailblazing Indian in a predominantly European sport after all. But the 26-year-old isn’t just surviving, he’s thriving at the very top. He’s the reigning Olympic and world champion. And at the 2024 Paris Olympics, which began on 26 July, the floppy haired javelin star will once again be India’s biggest medal hope. Not just because of the historic gold at Tokyo 2020, but the way he has built on that success.
On his Olympic debut in Tokyo, Chopra shed baggage worth decades to capture gold in the men’s javelin throw event, thus becoming the first Indian (since independence) to win a medal at a track and field event. He was also only the second Indian to win an individual Olympic gold after Abhinav Bindra (10m air rifle at the 2008 Beijing Games).
It was a momentous, era-defining performance that catapulted Chopra into the spotlight, and turned him into the biggest non-cricketing sports star in India. Despite the heady reception after his Tokyo triumph, Chopra, with guidance from long-time coach Klaus Bartonietz, has gone about his business with laser focus.
Indian sport has rarely seen a clutch performer like him. Since Tokyo, he has competed in 15 events and never done worse than a second place. Nine of those events have finished with Chopra clinching the top spot. In the last three years, he has won the Olympics, the World Championship (2023), the Diamond League final (2022) and defended his Asian Games gold (2023).
“It was nice to win gold in Tokyo,” Chopra had said in Doha, where he finished second this year. “The main thing was that I handled the pressure of such a big competition. It instilled a sense of belief in me that I can compete with the best in the world.”
That confidence has served him well even as the pressure to break the 90m barrier—which is to javelin throwers what the 10 seconds barrier is to 100m sprinters—has piled on. Chopra recorded a personal best of 89.94m at the Stockholm Diamond League in June 2022. That 6cm chasm has proved near impossible to bridge for Chopra, who is constantly questioned about it. The Indian javelin star, however, has maintained that winning medals, rather than worrying over distance, has been his biggest driving force.
“The goal is clear to me: it is to defend the title,” he said in a recent interview with Sportstar.
The bigger concern for Chopra has been the niggling adductor injury that has hampered him since last season. It had flared up again this year and the Indian decided to skip the Ostrava Golden Spike event, which was held on 26 May. To that end, Chopra has taken a more cautious approach this year and not participated in too many events. He has competed in only two international events in 2024, and won gold at the most recent outing at the Paavo Nurmi Games (18 June) in Finland.
While injury prevention and management has been a big part of his training in the last few months, Chopra has also worked on getting stronger during the pre-season. Speed and flexibility, he believes, are his forte, but he wants to improve his strength and power too.
Chopra’s endurance has been put to the test recently as he has been forced to up his game in the second half of the events he competes in. Till about a year ago, the Indian was known to lay down the marker. In Tokyo, Chopra needed just one throw in qualification, of 86.65m, to seal a place in the final. Three days later, on 7 August, he made the gold medal-winning throw on his second attempt.
But when under pressure, Chopra won the 2023 Lausanne Diamond League on his fifth throw and the 2022 Asian Games with his fourth out of six. He gave leader Jakub Vadlejch of the Czech Republic a scare on his very final throw in Doha, which landed at 88.36m, just 2cm short of Vadlejch’s winning mark. It remains his best throw of the season so far.
“The good thing about it is that whenever the competition gets stretched— like it did today—I can still get my best throw at the end,” he said after the event.
While he started off as a young challenger in Tokyo, Chopra will be the man to beat in Paris. The biggest threat to his title defence may come from Vadlejch, the silver medallist from Tokyo, and the Germans Julian Webber and Max Dehning. The 19-year-old Dehning is the only one to have registered a throw of over 90m in 2024, and became the youngest to enter the 90m-club when he threw the spear to 90.20m at the German Winter Throwing Championships in February.
From claiming India’s first U-20 World Championship gold in 2016 to the country’s first World Championship gold in 2023, everything he has done so far has been ground-breaking. At Paris, a battle-hardened Chopra will take a stab at history yet again.
Deepti Patwardhan is a sportswriter based in Mumbai.
