Injury is fine now, next big target is 2025 world championship: Neeraj Chopra

PTI, Sep 27, 2024, 12:05 PM IST

Promising to be 100 per cent fit for the new season, India’s two-time Olympic medal-winning javelin throw star Neeraj Chopra on Friday said a podium finish in the 2025 Tokyo World Championships is the next big target on his mind going forward.

The 26-year-old is back in the country after winding up his season with a second-place finish at the Diamond League finale in Brussels.

This was after he became the first Indian track-and-field athlete to claim successive Olympic medals by adding a silver in Paris to the momentous gold clinched in Tokyo.

“The season is over now. The biggest target for next year is the World Championship, and we will begin preparations for that now. The Olympics are always on our minds, but we have four years for that,” Neeraj told PTI Videos on the sidelines of a conference on ‘Mission Olympics 2036’ organised at the Sports University of Haryana here.

The world championship is scheduled to be held from September 13 to 21 next year.

Chopra battled an adductor muscle niggle throughout the year and it also affected his performance at both the Olympics and the DL finale, where he also competed with a fractured left hand.

He had spoken about consulting doctors at the end of the season to decide whether to go for a surgery to fix the problem.

Asked about his fitness, Chopra played down concerns and also stated that he will look to improve his technique. The Haryana-lad is trained by renowned German biomechanics expert Klaus Bartonietz.

“It was an injury-plagued year but injury is fine now, I will be 100 per cent fit for the new season,” he asserted.

“Technical issues are also there but we will work on them. I will look to improve my technique. I do like to train in India but when competitions start, I prefer to train abroad,” he said.

Reflecting on India’s Olympic performance, which yielded six medals but no gold this time, Chopra pointed out that the country could have got more as reflected by the half a dozen fourth place finishes.

“There were a lot of fourth positions. (But) this time, we had a very good performance in the Paralympics and won several medals.

“In the coming times, we expect strong performances in both the Olympics and the Paralympics,” said Chopra.

Chopra has been working hard to hit the 90m mark but hasn’t managed so far despite coming close. In the Paris Olympics, his silver-winning throw was 89.45m and he was bested by Pakistan’s Arshad Nadeem, who broke the Games record with a 92.97m effort.

At the DL finale, Chopra threw 87.86m to miss the top finish by just one centimetre.