Neeraj Chopra takes home staggering amount after historic World Championships gold

Neeraj Chopra added the World Athletics Championships gold to his already teeming list of accolades.

Chopra had already been one of just two Indians with a World Championships and now, he has become the only one from his country with two medals in the competition and the first to win gold. Chopra had started off with a foul throw in the final in Budapest on Sunday.

However, his second throw turned out to be the winning one as he managed to get the javelin to a distance of 88.17m. It helped him stay ahead of Pakistan’s Arshad Nadeem, who himself made history for his his country by winning silver and Czech Republich’s Jakub Vadlejch.

Neeraj was awarded gold in an official podium ceremony after the day’s competitions were over before the Indian national anthem was played. He takes hom a cash prinze money of $70,000 (around Rs58 lakh). Nadeem, meanwhile, won the silver with a throw of 87.82m, and Czech Republic’s Jakub Vadlejch (86.67m) bagged the bronze medal. Nadeem got a cash award of $35,000. Vadlejch got $22,000.

Neeraj is now just the third javelin thrower after his idol Jan Zelezny and Norway’s Andreas Thorkildsen to have accomplished the treble of winning gold in the Continental, Olympic and World Championships. He had won gold at the 2018 Asian Games in Jakarta, gold at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and now at the 2023 World Athletics Championships. He is the first Indian javelin thrower to win gold at the Commonwealth Games, Asian Games, Olympics and the athletics World Championships. In addition to that, he was junior World Champion in 2016 and won the Diamond League in 2022.

Among the major senior competitions he has competed in since 2017, it is only at the 2022 World Championships that he missed out on gold. He had won silver due to Grenada’s Anderson Peters managing a monster throw of 90.54. Even that was the best result any Indian had ever managed in the competition. It also made him one of just two Indian athletes to have won a medal in the competition. Anju Bobby George was the first when she won bronze in women’s long jump at the 2003 Paris World Championships. Neeraj’s performance on Sunday thus made him the first Indian to win more than one athletics World Championships medals in his career.