A sporting landmark for India

Thanks to Neeraj Chopra, August 7 will always be a Red Letter Day in Indian sporting history.

On this day in 2021, Neeraj Chopra won the men’s javelin throw gold medal at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.

It was India’s first-ever Olympic medal in athletics and the realisation of a long-standing dream – one which legends like Milkha Singh and PT Usha had also chased but fallen short of by agonisingly narrow margins.

Moreover, Neeraj Chopra’s Tokyo crown was India’s second individual gold medal at the Summer Games after Abhinav Bindra’s shooting title at Beijing 2008.

Here’s a look back at how Neeraj Chopra went about scripting history in Tokyo.

Neeraj Chopra’s Road to Tokyo 2020

Neeraj Chopra’s journey towards his Tokyo destiny began on a note of failure.

An up-and-coming junior athlete in the domestic circuit at the time, Neeraj Chopra failed to qualify for Rio 2016. While the qualification standard for Rio Games was 83 metres, Neeraj’s best throw in the qualification window measured 82.23m.

As fate would have it, just a week after the qualification window closed, Neeraj Chopra logged an 86.48m throw, a junior world record, to win the 2016 World U20 Championships in Bydgoszcz, Poland.

It boosted Neeraj’s confidence and he continued to impress, winning medals at big events like the Asian and Commonwealth Games.

With Tokyo 2020 approaching, Neeraj Chopra suffered a setback. 

An elbow injury, which had forced him to miss the 2019 Doha World Championships, forced him to undergo surgery on May 3, 2019 – the same day the qualification window for the Tokyo Olympics opened.

Racing to recover in time, Neeraj Chopra returned to competitive action in January 2020 at a Potchefstroom athletics meet in South Africa and qualified for the Tokyo Olympics.

His throw in Potchefstroom measured 87.86m, comfortably surpassing the 85m qualifying standard set for the Tokyo Olympics.

With COVID pushing back the Tokyo Games to 2021, it gave Neeraj Chopra additional time to finetune himself for his debut Olympics.

“I took the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics positively as I thought I have got one more year for training. In that one year, I worked on my weaknesses like improving some techniques and gaining strength,” Neeraj Chopra said later.

Once competitions resumed in 2021, Neeraj Chopra gathered steam, winning multiple domestic meets. The run-up to Tokyo also saw him record a national-record throw of 88.07m, which he later bettered at the Indian Grand Prix 3 in Patiala.

Neeraj Chopra’s Olympic medal and battle vs Johannes Vetter

Despite his good form, Neeraj Chopra was far from a medal favourite at Tokyo.

The strapping Indian was a dark horse at best in a star-studded 32-man field, which featured the reigning world champion Anderson Peters of Grenada, London 2012 champion Keshorn Walcott from Trinidad and Tobago, Rio silver-medallist Kenyan thrower Julius Yego, among other big names.

But perhaps Neeraj Chopra’s biggest challenge at…