The first thing Neeraj Chopra wants people to know, before the regrets and the rebuilding and the new faces in his corner, is that he feels fit. It is the answer Indian sport has been waiting nine months for, and he gives it without ceremony.
He had spent the build-up to this Doha return at Magglingen, the Swiss Olympic training base perched above Biel, working in conditions about as far removed from the roar of a championship arena as javelin throwing allows. It was at the same venue, the Suhaim bin Hamad Stadium, that he crossed the 90-metre mark for the first time in his career last year, with a throw of 90.23m.
“It’s amazing to be back in the competition season, especially in Doha,” he said, before admitting, almost as an aside, that the occasion still carries nerves.
“I am a little bit nervous speaking in front of so many people after a long time.”
He liked Magglingen precisely for what it withheld.
“It’s in the mountains, it’s very quiet, and you can focus on your training and your technique,” he said.
There is something telling in an athlete of his stature seeking out quiet rather than noise, and it sets up the contrast at the heart of his return: a year ago, the noise around him, the pressure of a season that had to end somewhere, pushed him onto a Tokyo runway he should not have walked.
That admission, when it comes, is direct rather than defensive.
“I had some injury issues last year before the Tokyo World Championships. I don’t think competing there was a good decision because I already knew I had some problems. But because that was the last competition of the year, I wanted to compete there.”
The back injury had struck 12 days before Tokyo, by his own coach’s account at the time, and Chopra finished eighth with a season-worst 84.03m, ending a run of 26 consecutive events in the top two. The body, once compromised, did not simply heal.
“As athletes, when we try to manage one injury, we end up getting another one,” he said.
“After the back injury during the World Championships, I had another one in my ankle and then in my shoulder.”
What followed was not a quick fix but a recalibration: a sit-down with his team and his physiotherapist, a decision to stop chasing fitness and start rebuilding it, and a first throwing session only a month and a half before this week’s press conference. He told the Doha organisers he could only confirm a week out.
“Then I said yes. It’s my favourite place to open my season.”
GOING BACK TO HIS TECHNIQUE
The most significant shift, though, sits in his corner rather than on the runway. After Tokyo, Chopra parted ways with Jan Zelezny, the Czech great under whom he had broken the 90m barrier, in a split both men have described as amicable and mutual. Chopra does not relitigate it.
“Working with Jan opened my eyes to so many new ideas,” he had said of that stint.
But the World Championships left him wanting something else.
“After the World Championships, I thought I needed to work more with my own ideas.”
That search has led him back to where he started, training now under Jaiveer Singh Chaudhary, known to him simply as Jai, the man who first put a javelin in his hand at Panipat.
“Now I work with an Indian coach. He is my senior. When I started javelin, I started with him, so he knows my story from the last 15 or 16 years.”
The work with Chaudhary is not a technical overhaul.
“We are not working on anything specific or anything too deep. I am working on my natural technique,” he said, what he calls the throw that “originally came naturally” before a decade of expert hands reshaped it. His long-serving physiotherapist remains a constant through it all. “He has been there for the last eight or nine years. I have a good team now. I am very happy.”
WHY NEERAJ DOESN’T WATCH HIGHLIGHTS OF HIS 90M THROW
During the months of rehabilitation, the temptation to relive that Doha night, the throw that finally took him past 90m, must have been obvious. Chopra resisted it.
Asked how many times he’d watched it back, he was almost sheepish. “I have not watched it a lot,” he said, before explaining a habit that has nothing to do with this season and everything to do with how he watches himself compete.
“I really like my qualification throws from the Olympics and World Championships because at that time I am relaxed. Whenever I compete in the final of a major competition, I try really hard and become very aggressive, and then I forget my technique.”
“I don’t like to watch my throws from the finals. The throws in qualification are technically better.”
COMMONWEALTH GAMES AS TOUGH AS OLYMPICS
Ahead lie the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow and the Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya, both targeted, both circled as the season’s real tests once the Diamond League rhythm settles. Of the two, it is the Commonwealth field that has him most animated, not because of the occasion but because of who will be standing on the runway. “Even Anderson Peters from Grenada and Keshorn Walcott will be there. (Julius) Yego will be there. All of them have thrown beyond 90 metres. The Commonwealth Games will be no less competitive than the Olympics or the World Championships.”
That assessment is hardly hyperbole: Rumesh Pathirage of Sri Lanka arrives in Doha as the world leader after a 92.62m throw at the Rome Diamond League, the second-best mark by an Asian thrower in history, while Pakistan’s Arshad Nadeem holds the Olympic record at 92.97m, and Kenya’s Julius Yego rounds out a field thick with 90-metre throwers.
Of Pathirage specifically, the warmth is unguarded. “He is a really good guy and a good friend of mine. I am happy for him. It’s really big what he has achieved for Sri Lanka.”
Asked, finally, whether Doha might see another 90m throw, Chopra resists the easy promise. “This is my first competition of the season. I will try my best. I feel really good and really fit. Let’s see.”
It is a cautious answer rather than a bold one, but after the year he has had, caution from Chopra sounds a great deal like confidence.
– Ends
