Arshad Nadeem finally steps out of Neeraj Chopra’s shadow to smash Olympic record and win gold

Arshad Nadeem finally steps out of Neeraj Chopra’s shadow to smash Olympic record and win gold (PTI Photo)

Two men, both pathbreakers for their respective nations, born within a year of each other, in places just 500km apart. But Arshad Nadeem, born in Mian Channu in Pakistani Punjab, had a problem. No matter how well he threw in other competitions and meets, when it came to the big occasion, Neeraj Chopra, his younger Indian rival, would always upstage him. It happened enough times to make people wonder whether the very sight of Chopra’s long mane and headband psyched Nadeem out a little. But in the magnificent surroundings of the Stade de France on Thursday night, Nadeem laid such theories to rest in emphatic fashion, putting together an astonishing series of throws that would have made Jan Zelezny – the Czech who was the greatest of them all – turn Pakistani-green with envy.

With the athletes out for the men’s 200m final during the first round of the javelin, Nadeem, the fourth to throw, found no rhythm at all. He stuttered through his run-up, stopped and went back to his starting position. With the clock winding down, he fouled. At that stage, the ghosts of so many near-misses might have troubled a lesser athlete. Not Nadeem. With his second throw, he ended the competition. He could scarcely believe his eyes as he followed the javelin’s arc once he released it. Long before it was measured, he probably knew that he would be taking Pakistan’s first athletics gold back home.

When the distance flashed up on the screen, there was a collective gasp from over 80,000 people. Even Nadeem looked stunned, because 92.97m meant that he had shattered Andreas Thorkildsen’s Olympic record from Beijing (2008) by a whopping 2.40m. Even in a field of such incredible quality, every other man knew that it was over. The peerless Zelezny himself only once threw over 90m in an Olympic final, and that was 90.17 when he clinched his hat-trick gold in 2000.

Chopra had just one legal throw, itself a monstrous 89.45m – a season’s best for him – as he tried to respond to the gauntlet thrown down. But in somehow trying to go where he had never gone before, he kept fouling subsequent attempts. In truth, the fluency just wasn’t there, with his mind probably as frazzled as everyone else’s.

When Chopra won the Commonwealth Games gold on the Gold Coast in 2018, Nadeem was eighth. At the Asian Games in Jakarta later that year, Nadeem finished third, more than seven metres behind Chopra’s gold-winning throw. Both men then made history by making it to the Olympic final in Tokyo, but Nadeem’s historic fifth place was easily trumped by Chopra winning an unprecedented gold with a throw of 87.58m.

At the World Championships in Oregon in 2022, neither man won, but Chopra took silver with a throw that was 1.97m longer than Nadeem in fifth. A year later in Budapest, Nadeem won a historic silver for Pakistan. Ahead of him? Chopra, who threw 1.98m further.

Nadeem’s ground-breaking Commonwealth Games gold in Birmingham in 2022 had come at the expense of a strong field that included three past and present Olympic medallists in Anderson Peters, Julius Yego and Keshorn Walcott. But with Chopra not present, the medal lacked the sheen it might otherwise have had.

Now, finally, Nadeem has his moment. And Chopra was one of the first to go and give him a congratulatory hug. Fortunately, both men share a warm relationship that isn’t coloured by any of the jingoism so often seen in both countries. In Chopra’s case, that maturity clearly comes from his family.

After his World Championships win in 2023, Saroj Devi, his mother, was asked a provocative question about her son beating a Pakistani. “Look, everyone has come to play in the field,” she said. “One or the other will definitely win. So, there is no question of being from Pakistan or Haryana.”

“And it is a matter of great happiness. Even if that Pakistani had won, there would’ve been great happiness.”

In Paris, the Pakistani did win. And boy, did he deserve it.

In exclusive arrangement with RevSportz