By Ron DePasquale
India has at last won gold in track and field at the Olympics.
Neeraj Chopra won the men’s javelin on Saturday with a throw of 87.58 meters, nearly a foot farther than the silver medalist, Jakub Vadlejch of Czech Republic.
“It feels unbelievable,” Chopra said, according to Reuters. “This is our first Olympic medal for a very long time, and in athletics it is the first time we have gold, so it’s a proud moment for me and my country.”
The gold medal is India’s first at the Tokyo Games and only its second ever at a Summer Games. Abhinav Bindra, who won the 10-meter air rifle competition in Beijing in 2008, was India’s only other Olympic gold medalist in an individual competition.
In 2018, Chopra won gold at the Asian Games and the Commonwealth Games, but an elbow injury that required surgery caused him to miss nearly a year of competition. Then came the coronavirus pandemic, which disrupted his comeback.
“Take a bow, young man! You have fulfilled a nation’s dream. Thank you!” Bindra wrote on Twitter. “Also, welcome to the club — a much needed addition!”
India, the world’s second-most-populous country, has been trying to improve its underwhelming Olympic game, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been keen to use sports to raise its global profile.
Modi has been tweeting congratulations to several Indian athletes during the Games, including Chopra. “History has been scripted at Tokyo!” Modi wrote. “The young Neeraj has done exceptionally well. He played with remarkable passion and showed unparalleled grit.”
After India’s substandard performance at the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro — one silver and one bronze — the government began funneling money to a sports bureaucracy that was underfunded for decades and stained by corruption. Private ventures stepped in, training elite athletes whose upward trajectory they might be able to harness. And state money has started to trickle to grass-roots sports, too.
There has been some jubilation in India during these Games, where it has won seven medals. It defeated Germany to win bronze in men’s field hockey, the team’s first medal in that sport in more than 40 years. The women’s hockey team came close, falling to Britain for bronze.
The badminton star P.V. Sindhu won a bronze medal in women’s singles badminton, becoming the first Indian woman and only the second Indian athlete to win two individual Olympic medals after winning a silver in Rio.
Aditi Ashok narrowly missed a medal in women’s golf, losing out on a bronze by a single shot.
India’s other medals came in weight lifting, wrestling and boxing.
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