The world beyond 90m
The Hindu
A look at where Neeraj Chopra’s javelins could be headed
With his recent 89.94m at the Stockholm Diamond League, Neeraj Chopra is now just six centimetres away from the magical 90m mark. What will he be throwing at his peak?
That’s a future many would like to peep into.
The late Garry Calvert, the Australian coach who moulded Chopra’s career and guided him to the under-20 World Championships gold in 2016, had revealed five years ago that he had worked out a plan for the massive throws.
“The development plan I had would have seen Neeraj do 90m in 12 months and 92 to 95m in two years,” Calvert had told this writer in May 2017 before his departure to China where he died a year later. “He is the best talent I’ve seen in 30 years.”
Chopra himself has made it clear that while 90m remains an important target since it places him among the world’s best, he is not obsessed by it. That he takes it step by step, first 90m, and the bigger throws will follow when the conditions are right.
“I’ve had a feeling, from 2018, that a 90m-plus throw might come any time… just don't know when it will come and am not placing any expectations on myself,” he said recently.
While Chopra’s coach Klaus Bartonietz has kept everything under wraps for the time being, chief national coach Radhakrishnan Nair feels Chopra will uncork some very big ones in a couple of years.
He has worn India’s blues, albeit in an Under-19 World Cup, with K.L. Rahul, Mayank Agarwal, Harshal Patel and Jaydev Unadkat as his teammates. He has proudly adorned the Lion’s Crest — the famed Mumbai cricket logo — in all three formats. He has played with Yuvraj Singh, against Virat Kohli and Rahul Dravid and has the likes of Rahul and Joe Root in his illustrious list of dismissals. He is also a software developer for an IT giant, based in California. Virtually every middle-class Indian over the last three decades at some stage dreams of being either a cricketer or an IT professional. Saurabh Netravalkar has been combining two dreams, even after relocating to USA to pursue academics at the prestigious Cornell University in 2015.
Unlike most of the Olympic-bound athletes, who opt to train abroad before the big event, boxer Amit Panghal prefers training in home conditions prior to Paris 2024. A former World championships silver medallist and a World No. 1, Panghal won the 51kg quota place in the only chance he got. He wants to follow his own plans to script success in Paris.
The other men’s semifinal Friday is Norway’s Casper Ruud, twice the runner-up in Paris — to Rafael Nadal in 2022 and to Novak Djokovic in 2023 — against Germany’s Alexander Zverev, a finalist at the 2020 U.S. Open, an Olympic gold medalist and into the final four at Roland Garros for the fourth consecutive year.