India’s Olympic superstar Neeraj Chopra returns to the Commonwealth Games later today after missing the previous edition in Birmingham due to injury. And guess what? A line-up of very high-profile contenders awaits him.
Event Context
There are three Indians in the fray. Rohit Yadav and Yash Vir Singh are the other two. The javelin contest will kick off at 2.55 pm (IST). There will be a qualifying round where an 84m throw will guarantee a place in the final showdown. The 12 best qualifiers out of 18 will make up the final list. The venue of the event is the Scotstoun Stadium in Glasgow.
For the past several years, javelin has be India’s biggest event at the Olympics, the Asian Games and the CWG. In India, it’s on a par with a 100m dash, if truth be told. In a glorious career, there is hardly anything that Chopra has not achieved but he won’t mind winning another CWG gold, having previously won it in the 2018 Gold Coast.
Match Outlook
The 2021 gold and 2024 silver winner at the Olympics is once again up against Arshad Nadeem of Pakistan, who threw his javelin like a man possessed two years ago in Paris to win gold against all odds. In 2022, when Chopra didn’t participate in Birmingham, it was Nadeem who claimed the gold medal there. There is another name from the subcontinent that has become big in a short time. It’s Sri Lanka’s Rumesh Pathirage. This year, he has won Diamond League events in Doha and Rome.
There is also the veteran Keshorn Walcott of Trinidad and Tobago, the 2012 Olympic gold winner and the 2025 world champion. There is Grenada’s Anderson Peters, the Olympic bronze medallist in Paris and the 2019 and 2022 world champion.
The event promises to be a cracker. All five of these have thrown a throw of 90m or more. Keshorn Walcott at 90.16m is the shortest among these five. Chopra is slightly ahead at 90.23m. Pathirage is at 92.62m, Nadeem is at 92.97m, and Peters is at 93.07.
But we have seen over the years that one’s best throw never has a huge bearing on one’s performance in an event. It’s your performance on that particular day that matters. The weather, the rhythm and full fitness are actually the factors that matter. There are quite a few Olympic gold medals that have gone to athletes under 90m, Chopra being one of them in the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 at 87.58m. Then in the next edition in Paris, Chopra threw a throw of 89.45, but this time he had to settle for a silver.
