From chubby kid to Olympic champion

New Delhi: A plump kid took to athletics to lose weight and ended up being India's first track-and-field Olympic gold-medallist. Sounds like a fairytale? That's Neeraj Chopra's life actually, all of 23 and a superstar, or dare one say a messiah, that Indian athletics had been waiting for over a century.

On Saturday, with his javelin in hand, Chopra was nothing short of a rockstar at Tokyo's Olympic stadium, which should have been full to capacity to watch his genius unfold but had just a handful officials and coaches to cheer him on thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. He got everyone to cheer for him like he always does and didn't even need to throw a personal best of 88.07m. The gold was sealed with the 87.58m throw, which was just his second of the final round. But many years before this moment of greatness, Chopra was under tremendous pressure from his joint family of 17 to lose weight.

He was all of 13 at that point and had become a mischievous boy, often fiddling the bee hives on village trees and trying to pull buffaloes by their tails. His father Satish Kumar Chopra wanted something to be done to discipline the boy. So, after a lot of cajoling, the child finally agreed to do some running to shed the flab. His uncle took him to Shivaji Stadium in Panipat -- around 15km from his village. Chopra wasn't interested in running and almost instantly fell in love with javelin throw when he saw a few seniors practising at the stadium. He decided to try his luck and as the cliched saying goes, rest is history, which would now probably make its way into school textbooks.