When India helped Pakistan

You can tell he is a good athlete when he beats you in an Olympic final. But when you find out he does not even have a javelin to train with, you feel the need to set up a fundraiser to buy him one — only that same javelin ends up beating you in the Stade de France at the Paris Olympics.

This is a story about the friendship between India’s Neeraj Chopra and Pakistan’s Arshad Nadeem. What embellishes the story even more is the healthiness of their rivalry, despite the tensions between their religions.

Neeraj and Arshad, both now 27, have shared the Javelin throwing stage since their childhood. Along with Grenadian athlete, Anderson Peters, they are the only ones to have overtaken the European stars. Their friendship came out of the blue, and so did that between their mothers — Saroj Devi and Raziah Parveen — who are the first to support them in the stands and online, calling them “brothers” rather than friends.

Given Neeraj’s Olympic Gold in Tokyo, as well as his Asian and World Championship title in 2023, he was considered the favourite for the Paris Games. However, he received the news that Arshad was struggling to train: Pakistan’s cricket-dedicated training grounds hinder his ability to practice, not to mention the various problems caused by his increasingly faulty javelin from 2015.

Arshad was training for Paris with a rope-coiled wooden stick, despite his silver medal at the 2023 World Championship, his gold medal at the Commonwealth Games and his 5th place in Tokyo. Thus, Neeraj took advantage of his own popularity online to organize a fundraiser to buy Arshad a new javelin. And, with that same javelin, Arshad overtook him in the Olympic Games with a “throw of a lifetime”, beating his personal best by over three meters (92.97). Neeraj took the silver medal with a distance of 89.45m.

“Any international athlete who wishes to compete for and win an Olympic medal needs the right equipment and infrastructure to do so”, said Neeraj as he felt no regret towards the outcome that stripped him from gold, as it was equipment that his friend Arshad lacked in his home country. Thanks to the fundraiser promoted by the now celebrity-status Indian athlete, Arshad will also have a sport centre named after him.

“I will help to make athletics a life-changing experience for young people”, says Arshad, third out of eight sons of a retired construction worker, as he returns with the Gold medal around his neck from Paris, greeted with honour by his people.

by Giampaolo Mattei