IT took our solitary Olympic gold medallist Arshad Nadeem to remind us of the old adage: Success has many fathers but Failure is an orphan.

No matter how many awards, honours, cash prizes and plots may be bestowed upon him, it is clear that Arshad’s achievement in Paris was singularly his own. His trusty javelin soared into the skies and landed at 92.97 metres, and then to show that this second throw was not a fluke, on its final flight it landed a metre short — at 91.79m.

Arshad’s portly coach Salman Iqbal Butt watched from the stands, recalling when, as a teenager at Aitchison College in 1977, he threw a javelin and set a collegiate record of 50.69m.

The public has opened its hearts to Arshad. Governments (federal and provincial) have opened their coffers to him, but not their private purses. They are personally as ungenerous as Lord Chesterfield once was to Samuel Johnson when he begged his lordship for patronage to support his project — the first English dictionary. It took Johnson seven years to complete his magnum opus. Chesterfield then condescended to offer an endorsement.

No one needed to ask Arshad where he came from.

In February 1755, Johnson........

© Dawn