The gold medallist starring in India’s Olympic dreams

The boy grew heavy on the milk, cream and butter of his grandmother’s doting. By age 13, Neeraj Chopra weighed nearly 86kg, making him one of the biggest boys in his tiny farming village. His father and uncles urged him to join a gym to lose weight. By chance, he saw a javelin being thrown and noticed that, in flight, it seemed to shimmy like a fish through water. He was smitten.A decade after that improbable beginning, Chopra won the javelin competition at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. It was the first gold medal won by India in track and field, considered the marquee sport of the Summer Games, and only the country’s second in an individual event in more than a century of Olympic competition.Chopra’s triumph inspired athletes across India. And as it raised the country’s dreams for more medals at this year’s Paris Olympics, it also helped to stoke a national ambition for something even bigger: a chance to host the Summer Games for the first time. medium111955312In October, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared at a meeting of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in Mumbai that India would “leave no stone unturned” in seeking to host the 2036 Olympic and Paralympic Games.That quest could yield another transformative moment for India: a huge national effort both to engage a vast youth population in sports and to leverage one of the last truly global stages as a validation of India’s economic, political and technological primacy.If India’s bid to host the Games succeeds, the 2036 Olympics will follow a template established over the past 60 years by three other Asian nations — Japan (Tokyo 1964), South Korea (Seoul 1988) and China (Beijing 2008) — for whom the Summer Olympics served as a symbol of transition and emergence.“It would be the moment that we have truly arrived,” said Abhinav Bindra, who won India’s first individual gold, in shooting, at the 2008 Beijing Games.A state devoted to sportsAlong the road into Khandra, a village of about 3,000 people in the rice and wheat fields about 110km northwest of New Delhi, two signs announce Chopra’s status as an Olympic champion. Photographs of him adorn the courtyard walls and the gate to Sanskriti Public School, to which Chopra has donated javelins and other sporting equipment.“It seemed next to impossible that anyone from here could win an Olympic medal,” said Tushar Chopra, 15, a distant cousin and an athlete at the school. “Now, with Neeraj, it seems within our reach.”Neeraj Chopra’s brilliant, unlikely career illustrates the growing embrace and possibility of Olympic sports in India, where, as recently as the late 1990s and early 2000s, some top Olympic hopefuls lived in sheds built for animals and in train cars while administrators took up residence in luxury homes.“So many people ask, ‘Who are your idols?’” Chopra, now 26, said in an interview at a track meet in Eugene, Oregon, in September. “My own journey motivates me.” medium111955373 medium111955394Unlike China, which became an Olympic power by using a centralised system of identifying, recruiting and training athletes on an industrial scale, India relied for decades on a patchwork approach directed by its 28 diverse states.Among the most dedicated to sports is Haryana, which includes Khandra. An agricultural region that accounts for about 2% of India’s population, it produced nearly 25% of the country’s 120-plus competitors at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics.Haryana is known primarily for its wrestlers and boxers, athletes of robust strength. The state government encourages sports participation by offering jobs, land and cash prizes to medal winners. Sports also provide refuge and liberation for women in a conservative, patriarchal area where girls in some villages are not permitted to wear jeans or have cellphones.Yet there was (and is) no stadium or youth development system in Khandra. Chopra began attending a gym in the nearby town of Panipat and running on the track at an adjacent stadium there. One day, he noticed an older athlete, Jai Chaudhary, throwing a javelin and tried it himself. There was no dream of the Olympics then, Chopra said. Only a teenager’s curiosity.Without regular access to formal coaching, Chopra began to teach himself. To build stamina, he sometimes jogged behind an uncle’s motorbike, wearing the uncle’s sneakers, a size too small, and enduring blisters to complete his workouts. He honed his throwing technique by watching cellphone videos of Jan Zelezny, a three-time Olympic champion from the Czech Republic, and shared a javelin with others in training sessions. (First, though, they used a pump to water the field’s hard, dry ground, fearing that if they did not, their precious lances might shatter upon landing.) medium111955446Eventually, Chopra advanced to regional and national training centres. At 18, he set a world junior record. By then, India’s overall development had jolted the country’s sporting bureaucracy to life.Since 2017, Chopra has been tutored by elite German coaches. After surgery on his right elbow in 2019, he recovered at India’s first privately funded high-performance centre.He has also been aided by Sports Authority of India, an arm of the sports ministry that subsidises the coaching, travel and training of elite athletes and provides each a monthly stipend of about ₹50,000. When Chopra won his Olympic gold, Modi phoned to congratulate him.Now a sculpted 86kg, with an amiable handsomeness that has been featured on the cover of Vogue India, Chopra is one of his country’s most celebrated athletes. He has 9mn followers on Instagram and counts Visa, Coca-Cola and Tata Life Insurance among his sponsors, cultivating a personal brand that has pushed his wealth into millions of dollars.And while Chopra has left behind his home district, and his treasured Ford Mustang, to train in South Africa and Europe, his influence in India is clear.“Everyone wants a Neeraj Chopra in their household,” said Poonam Singh, a women’s taekwondo coach, “whether it’s a girl or a boy.”India’s ambitious goalThe host of the 2036 Olympics, the next Summer Games available after Paris, Los Angeles and Brisbane, Australia, is not expected to be chosen until at least 2026 or 2027. But IOC president Thomas Bach said in October that there was a “strong case” for India to emerge from a large field of potential bidders.Victory, though, is by no means assured. Extreme heat and persistently poor air quality could affect India’s chances. A scandal involving accusations of sexual abuse inside the country’s wrestling federation continues to bring intense scrutiny. And sports officials acknowledge a serious problem with doping.Scepticism remains, too, about India’s ability to organise one of the world’s largest sporting events. Its hosting of the 2010 Commonwealth Games was marred by corruption, lax preparation and unhygienic conditions in the athletes’ village. Bach has bluntly warned that if the IOC does not have sufficient confidence in India’s historically dysfunctional national Olympic committee, “there’s no valid candidacy”.“They have to overcome the general perception that they are incompetent,” said Richard Pound of Montreal, an influential IOC delegate for more than 40 years and now an honourary member of the Olympic committee. medium111955283Former sports minister Anurag Thakur bristled at Pound’s suggestion, noting that India recently became the first nation to land a spacecraft near the moon’s south pole and last year hosted a barnstorming Group of 20 economic summit in 60 cities.“If you are doing well in other fields,” Thakur said, “why not sports?”India’s stated aim is to finish among the top 10 or 15 nations in the medal count at the 2036 Olympics and among the top five by 2048, a century after it gained independence from British colonial rule. Its federal sports budget has tripled in the past decade, Thakur said. And Modi suggested in October that securing the Olympics would prompt about $1.3trn in spending to modernise India’s infrastructure.Eric Garcetti, the US ambassador to India who played an integral role in securing the 2028 Summer Olympics for Los Angeles when he was mayor of the city, said he felt it was a matter of when, not if, India would be chosen to host.Among other things, he said, it would be a democratising acknowledgment that the Olympics are not “just a rich man’s club”.A model of successChopra’s gold medal in Tokyo remains a transformative moment in places like Panipat. After he won, a local coach said, roughly 100 boys and girls came to the stadium where he got his start, eager to try the javelin. Replica javelins made of bamboo appeared in stores. And India’s track and field federation began to celebrate August 7, the day of Chopra’s victory in Tokyo, as National Javelin Day.Odisha has since built India’s first indoor track stadium. And at least seven foreign coaches have been hired to help prepare the nation’s runners, jumpers and throwers for the Paris Olympics. Scott Simmons, an American who coaches India’s distance runners, said, “Their potential is unlimited.”The investment is already yielding returns. India set a national record by winning 107 medals at the 2023 Asian Games. In the javelin competition at the world track and field championships in Budapest last summer, Chopra finished first, and two teammates were fifth and sixth. India’s men’s 4x400m relay team, prepared by a Jamaican who once helped coach Usain Bolt, set an Asian record in reaching the final.Success, suddenly, feels infectious.“Now,” Chopra said, “I can say, ‘If I can do it, you can also do it.’” medium111955271The track and field federation said that it was seeking to increase the number of top-level coaches to 5,000 from 1,100. And it plans to upgrade or construct 200 high-performance centres, in hopes of expanding the pool of elite athletes in the sport to 10,000 or more from the current 150.For now, though, Shivaji Stadium in Panipat, where Chopra first showed up a decade ago, remains as it was: spare and scruffy, with a dirt track encircling a dirt infield.On a cold and smoggy afternoon in January, Shabnam Singh, 20, arrived as she does six days a week, riding a motorcycle a half-hour from home with her mother to practice with a javelin that cost roughly half of the ₹15,000 monthly salary that her father earns as a farmhand.Shabnam had watched on television as Chopra won his gold medal in Tokyo, she said, and later met him at Shivaji Stadium. She has since won a Javelin Day competition. Now she wants more.“I want to play in the Olympics,” she said. “My dreams are really tall.”Kitty Bennett contributed to this story.