Star Indian javelin thrower Neeraj Chopra raised India’s hopes of a track and field medal when he qualified for the final at the Tokyo Olympic Games today, sealing a top place from his group, and finishing ahead of Germany’s Johannes Vetter, who is the favourite for gold at the quadrennial showpiece.<\/p>\n
At the Olympic Stadium, the 23-year-old Chopra, the junior world champion, cleared the automatic qualifying mark of 83.50 metres with his first attempt of 86.65 metres in Group A to emerge a strong contender for a medal in the final to be held on August 7. Vetter qualified second from Group A with a throw of 85.64 metres.<\/p>\n
Pakistan’s Arshad Nadeem, who shared the podium with Chopra at the 2018 Asian Games in Jakarta, was overall third with his best throw of 85.16 metres after he topped Group B.<\/p>\n
All eyes will be on Chopra in Saturday’s final as he is on a roll this season and is the owner of the national record \u2013 88.07m \u2013 which he achieved at the Indian Grand Prix in March.<\/p>\n
Germany’s Vetter \u2013 the 28-year-old who hurled the spear to a distance of 97.76 metres in an event in Poland last September and threatened Czech Republic’s Jan Zelezny’s world record of 98.48 metres (1996) \u2013 was below-par today, managing a best of 85.64 and taking all three attempts before he could make the grade. In contrast, Chopra made only a single attempt.<\/p>\n
In javelin throw, an athlete can make the final by either attaining the qualifying standard or by finishing among the top-12 competitors in the event.<\/p>\n
India’s other javelin thrower Shivpal Singh came up with dismal show and attained his best of 76.40 in his first attempt to finish 12th in Group B and failed to qualify. His other two attempts were 74.80 and 74.81 metres respectively. Shivpal was placed 27th overall among 31 athletes in fray.<\/p>\n
Following the conclusion of the qualification round, where 12 throwers qualified \u2013 seven from Group A and five from Group B \u2013 Chopra’s performance stood out, as, despite missing almost the entire 2020 due to injuries, he has come back strongly to be in contention for a medal on August 7.<\/p>\n
Chinese Taipei’s Chao-Tsun Cheng, Keshorn Walcott of Trinidad and Tobago and world champion Julius Yego of Kenya, meanwhile, failed to make the cut for the final.<\/p>\n
Chopra began his season with a new national record of 88.07 metres at the Indian Grand Prix in March and followed it up with another commendable 87.80m throw at the Federation Cup.<\/p>\n
He then headed to Europe to prepare for Tokyo 2020. There, Chopra threw 83.18m at a Lisbon meet for gold, managed another gold-winning effort of 80.96m in Sweden and threw an 86.79m at the Kuortane Games in Finland for bronze. All three events were held in June.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Star Indian javelin thrower Neeraj Chopra raised India’s hopes of a track and field medal when he qualified for the final at the Tokyo Olympic Games today, sealing a top place from his group, and finishing ahead of Germany’s Johannes Vetter, who is the favourite for gold at the quadrennial showpiece. At the Olympic Stadium, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9541,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9543"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9543\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9544,"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9543\/revisions\/9544"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}