India’s brightest gold medal hope Neeraj Chopra starts the defence of the javelin title, that he so memorably won in 2021 in Tokyo for the country’s first and only gold medal in Olympics history, here on Tuesday.
The athletics competition at the magnificent 80000-capacity Stade de France has already seen some fabulous finals, most notably last evening’s pulsating men’s 100metre final won by star American sprinter Noah Nyles by a heart-stopping five thousandths of a second.
But the Indian campaign in the discipline, more particularly in the road walk races, has been lukewarm measured by any standards.
Chopra’s event is, thus, eagerly looked forward to by the Indian camp.
The 26-year-old Haryana-born athlete will start here with the qualification round but is expected to face some tough competition in the finals scheduled on August 8.
Among those who will be aiming to trip Chopra would be Jakub Vadlejch of Czechia, Grenada’s Anderson Peters, a two-time world champion, Julian Weber Pakistan’s 2022 Commonwealth Games champion Arshad Nadeem and Germany’s Max Dehning, who has thrown 90.20metres earlier this season.
Vadlejch, the reigning Diamond League champion, had finished second behind Chopra in Tokyo to grab the silver medal and is among the leading contenders here.
Chopra’s best this season was 88.36m that he achieved on May 10 in Qatar.
But he has shown consistently that he is a big man player and the bigger the competition the better performance he comes up with as he showed so memorably in Tokyo in 2021.
Chopra has been placed in Group B of the qualification round along with Vadlejch, Dehning, Nadeem, Pole Marcin Krukowski, whose personal best is 89.55m, and Weber, with a throw of 89.54m as his best so far.
Another Indian contender, Kishore Jena, has been drawn in Group A with the likes of 90-plus throwers Julius Yego of Kenya and Keshorn Walcott of Trinidad and Tobago, along with Oliver Helander of Finland with a personal best of 89.83m.
Jena’s personal best has been a throw of 87.54, done in October 2023.