2026 has to be a great sporting year! |
A new year and with it comes fresh aspirations, greater efforts from the sports persons and perhaps enhanced progress as we look ahead to the sports scenario in the country. Surely the one big name that immediately strikes the mind has to be Neeraj Chopra, the Haryana young man who stormed the world of athletics in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics with a gold medal effort in javelin throw. That brought up India’s first medal in the Olympics in the athletics arena and that too straightaway a gold! Till then P. T. Usha, the current IOA President but the country’s darling athlete in the eighties, had remained the closest to winning an Olympic medal for the country, but missed it in the 400 m hurdles by as close as 0.01 seconds in the Los Angeles Games in 1984.
And yet has Chopra now dashed the hopes of his myriad fans with this decision to part ways with his Czech coach Jan Zelezny, a man whose accomplishment in javelin throw is unparalleled? Chopra had been with Zelezny for just a year and it was during this period that he had scaled a new high. The 90.23 m was his first 90m plus throw that helped him finish second in the Doha Diamond League in May last year.
It was a different matter that later in the year he had the mortification of slipping to the eighth place in the........