The Boy from Khandra

Evening in Tokyo, 7 August 2021. The great stadium was almost empty, because of the pandemic. Only athletes, coaches and officials sat in the stands. A tall young man in India's blue walked to the top of the runway, a javelin balanced lightly in his right hand.

He ran, turned side-on, and threw.

Before the javelin had even landed, he turned away from it and raised both arms to the sky. He knew.

A village in Haryana

Neeraj Chopra was born in 1997 in Khandra, a farming village near Panipat, in the state of Haryana, in northern India. His father, Satish Kumar, and his family farmed the land, and they lived together in a large joint family, with uncles, aunts and cousins under one roof.

As a boy, Neeraj loved food, and especially the sweets and rich milk dishes of village life. By the time he was about eleven or twelve, he had become quite heavy. Other children teased him about it. His family worried about his health.

So one of his uncles began taking him to the sports stadium in Panipat, so that he could run and get fit.

The javelin

At the stadium, Neeraj was not very interested in running laps. What caught his eye were the older athletes throwing javelins on the field. He asked if he could try.

One of the older throwers, Jaiveer Choudhary, saw his first throws and noticed something unusual. The chubby boy from the village had a natural, powerful arm. Jaiveer began to show him the basics, and Neeraj found, to his own surprise, that he loved it.

The nearest good coaching was far away, in Panchkula. Neeraj moved there as a young teenager to train at a state sports complex. Good javelins, spikes and travel to competitions all cost money, and his large farming family pooled what they could so that he could keep going. They never stopped him, even when his future in sport was far from certain.

Neeraj trained for hours each day. He lost the extra weight and grew tall and strong. And his throws went further, and further.

A world record

In 2016, aged eighteen, he went to the World Under-20 Championships in Bydgoszcz, Poland. There, he threw a new junior world record, and won the gold medal. It was the first time an Indian athlete had won a world title in athletics at any level.

Soon after, he was offered a post in the Indian Army as a junior commissioned officer. It gave him a steady salary, and for the first time he was able to support his family, instead of the other way round.

In 2018 he won gold at both the Commonwealth Games and the Asian Games. India began to talk about a possible Olympic medal.

Then came setbacks. In 2019, Neeraj had surgery on his throwing elbow and could not compete for many months. When he was finally ready to return, the pandemic arrived, and the Tokyo Olympics were postponed by a year. Competitions were cancelled. He trained, waited, and trained again, never knowing when he would next get the chance to throw against the best in the world.

He later said that those years taught him patience.

Seven August

In Tokyo, Neeraj qualified for the final with his very first throw. In the final itself, his first throw was long. His second was longer still: 87.58 metres. That was the throw he did not even watch land.

Nobody else came close. When the competition ended, Neeraj Chopra was Olympic champion.

It was independent India's first Olympic gold medal in athletics, and only its second individual Olympic gold in any sport. Across the country, people poured into the streets, danced, and wept. In Khandra, his family and neighbours celebrated late into the night.

Neeraj dedicated his medal to Milkha Singh, the "Flying Sikh", who had died just weeks earlier, and who had long hoped to see an Indian win Olympic gold in athletics. In honour of the day, India's athletics federation later named 7 August National Javelin Day.

A small dream

Neeraj went on to win many more great competitions, including the world championship in 2023. But a few weeks after Tokyo, he shared a quieter kind of victory. He took his parents on their very first aeroplane flight, and wrote that a small dream of his had come true.

The boy who was once taken to a stadium to lose a little weight had carried a whole village, and a whole country, along with him.

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Neeraj Chopra's Olympic and world championship results are listed on Olympics.com and by World Athletics, the governing body of the sport.