🇮🇳 Neeraj Chopra

Neeraj Chopra was born on 24 December 1997 in Khandra, a village of about 800 people in the Panipat district of Haryana. His father Satish Kumar was a small-holding farmer; his mother Saroj Devi was a homemaker. The young Chopra was, until age twelve, severely overweight — by his own admission, a chubby boy who was teased at school and whose family enrolled him in a Panipat gym in the hope that exercise would help. At the gym he watched a group of older boys throwing the javelin in an adjacent field at the Shivaji Stadium, and asked, on impulse, if he could try. His first throw, at twelve, was 35 metres. By thirteen he was throwing 55. By sixteen he had broken the Indian junior record. By eighteen — at the 2016 IAAF World U20 Championships in Bydgoszcz — he had thrown 86.48 metres and won the World Junior gold by nearly six metres over the next-best junior in the world.

He was inducted into the Indian Army in 2017 as a Junior Commissioned Officer with the 4 Rajputana Rifles, which meant he could train full-time on a government salary — a structural advantage Indian athletes had spent decades arguing should exist. He won the Asian Games gold in 2018 in Jakarta. He won the Commonwealth Games gold the same year on the Gold Coast. He went into the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 ranked fourth in the world; the consensus was that the Indian flag would be raised at the medal ceremony only if Johannes Vetter, the German world No. 1, had a catastrophe.

On the night of the Olympic final, Vetter had a catastrophe. He fouled twice, did not reach the qualifying mark of 83 metres, and was eliminated after three attempts. Chopra threw 87.03 in his first attempt, 87.58 in his second, and then never threw worse than 84 metres for the rest of the competition. The Czech Jakub Vadlejch, in second place, was reaching 86.67. The gold medal was assured by the fourth round. Chopra, in the final round, declined to throw — a unusual decision that he later explained simply: 'I did not want to risk an injury that I would regret for life. The gold medal was already on the table.' He sat on the warm-up bench and watched the rest of the field finish. The crowd of around 700 Indian officials, journalists and embassy staff sang the national anthem. He stood at attention, expressionless. He did not speak to the press for ninety minutes.

The next morning India learned the scale of what had happened. The Prime Minister called him. The President called him. The state government of Haryana announced a 6-crore cash award, plus a job offer of his choice. Reliance, Tata, Mahindra, Star Sports and Byju's signed him to endorsement contracts within fourteen days for a combined total above 15 crores rupees. He went home to Khandra a week later, where the village had built a 25-metre roadside cutout of him in his throwing pose; he laughed when he saw it. His mother, asked by a CNN reporter whether she had been confident her son would win, answered in Haryanvi: 'He throws the javelin. I do not know what that is. I only know my son is a good boy.'

Since Tokyo he has won the Diamond League title (2022), the World Championships gold (Budapest, 2023, with a throw of 88.17 metres), and the Asian Games gold for a second consecutive Games (Hangzhou, 2023). He missed most of 2024 to surgery on his groin. He returned at the Paris Olympics in 2024 and won silver behind Pakistan's Arshad Nadeem — his throw of 89.45 metres was a personal best, but Nadeem threw 92.97, the second-longest throw in Olympic history. Chopra applauded Nadeem first, gave him a long hug, and said afterwards: 'He threw the best throw of any human in twenty years. There is no second place to feel sad about.'

He is, in May 2026, 28 years old. He is the most-followed Indian athlete on Instagram outside cricket. He owns three properties in Panipat, all of which still face the same gym where, at twelve, he picked up a javelin for the first time. He is the only Indian athlete in the country's Olympic history to have won a gold medal in an individual track and field event. The next Indian athlete to do so will, by the structural arithmetic of Indian athletics development, not arrive for at least another generation. Chopra has, in some sense, ended one Indian wait and begun another.