New season, new rival, own style: Neeraj Chopra makes a spectacular comeback in Doha

ByTech Word News

Neeraj Chopra starts the season fit. That, more than any number on the scoreboard, is the headline Indian and global javelin fans have been waiting for ever since he limped out of last year’s World Championships in Tokyo.

“I feel really good and really fit,” he said on the eve of the Doha Diamond Leaguehis first competition in almost a year. The reassurance is important because of how the year before it ended.

The men’s javelin at the Doha Diamond League will begin at 23:14 IST on Friday, June 19. There is no television coverage of the event. The Wanda Diamond League YouTube and Facebook channels will stream the event live in India.

Neeraj went to Tokyo with a back injury and has now admitted he shouldn’t have competed at all.

“I don’t think it was a good decision to compete there because I already knew I had some problems,” he said.

“But since it was the last competition of the year, I wanted to compete there.

He finished eighth with 84.03m, a career-worst result, and the injuries were multiplying rather than healing.

“As athletes, if we try to manage one injury, we end up getting another one,” he said.

“After a back injury during the World Cup, I had another in my ankle and then another in my shoulder.

What followed was a long, deliberate rebuild rather than a quick comeback. Chopra sat down with his team and physical therapist and decided to take time out, having only thrown again for the first time a month and a half ago. He was based in Magglingen, the Swiss Olympic training center in the mountains above Biel.

“It’s very quiet and you can focus on training and technique,” he said.

“I really like it there.

He confirmed his place in Doha just a week after the Games, his favorite place to open the season and where he cleared 90m for the first time in his career last year, a personal best of 90.23m that still stands.

NEW COACH

The most noticeable change is in his corner. After Tokyo, Chopra parted ways with the legendary Jan Zelezny and returned to Jaiveer Singh Chaudhary, the coach who first put the javelin in his hands 15 years ago.

“After the World Cup, I said to myself that I have to work more with my own ideas,” he said.

“I am working with the Indian coach now. He is my senior. I started with him when I started javelin, so he knows my story from the last 15 or 16 years.” He insists that this work is not a technical revision but a return to instinct. “We’re not working on anything specific or too deep. I’m working on my natural technique,” he said.

Ahead of us are the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow and the Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya, both of which have confirmed targets for what he expects to be an unusually challenging season.

“As an Indian athlete, we have the Commonwealth Games and the Asian Games. So this is also a busy season,” he said, describing the Commonwealth field as deceptively brutal.

“It won’t be any less competitive than the Olympics or the World Championships.”

A NEW RIVAL

Rumesh Pathirage (right) with Neeraj Chopra at the 2025 NC Classic (PTI Photo)

This assessment is not theoretical. The man most likely to test him first is also rival Chopra helped create. At the Neeraj Chopra Classic in Bengaluru last July, Chopra won gold with 86.18m, Julius Yego took silver and 22-year-old Rumesh Pathirage settled for bronze with 84.34m, behind two men he grew up praying for.

After Chopra noticed how the young Sri Lankan froze in front of the cameras because of his English, Chopra told him not to be held back: speak without fear, because there are many more stages to come.

He attended far more than even Chopra could have predicted.

Pathirage started this season with 89.37m in March and 89.28m in Nairobi in April before finishing second to Anderson Peters in Rabat with 85.97m, his only loss this year.

A few days later in Rome, he set a national record of 92.62m, just 35cm behind Arshad Nadeem’s Asian record, making him the eighth best thrower in history and the second best Asian of all time. He has won six out of seven competitions this season and arrives in Doha as the world leader.

It will be his first Diamond League meeting with Chopra; their head-to-head is currently even, Bengaluru with Chopra, Tokyo with Pathirage, who finished seventh there to Chopra’s eighth.

Chopra has nothing but warmth for him.

“He’s a really good guy and a good friend of mine,” he said.

“I am happy for him. It is really big what he has achieved for Sri Lanka.”

Pathirage won’t be the only caster with something to prove. Doha brings together the entire Tokyo World Championship podium: world champion Keshorn Walcott, two-time former champion Anderson Peters and bronze medalist Curtis Thompson.

DOHA STORAGE FIELD

  • Keshorn Walcott (Trinidad and Tobago) – SB: 83.45m | PB: 90.16m
  • Neeraj Chopra (India) – SB: Still to compete | PB: 90.23m
  • Anderson Peters (Grenada) – SB: 86.08m | PB: 93.07m
  • Rumesh Tharanga Pathirage (Sri Lanka) – SR: 92.62m | PB: 92.62m
  • Curtis Thompson (USA) – SR: 85.33m | PB: 87.76m
  • Julius Yego (Kenya) – SB: 80.59m | PB: 92.72m
  • Jakub Vadlejch (Czech Republic) – SR: 85.24m | PB: 90.88m
  • Ahmed Sameh Mohamed Hussein (Egypt) – SR: 83.10m | PB: 83.10m
  • Artur Felfner (Ukraine) – SB: 83.11 m | PB: 84.32m

Doha has a habit of producing numbers that look unreal even by the sport’s standards. Thomas Rhler threw 93.90m here in 2017 to open his season, moving him to second on the all-time list. Peters’ own best of 93.07m also came in Doha in 2022 and still ranks second on the Diamond League’s all-time list.

Neeraj Chopra’s task on Friday is less than chasing those numbers. It’s simply to find out in front of a crowd for the first time in months whether the pitch he’s spent a year rebuilding is enough to hold off an opponent he once told to speak without fear.

– The end

Issued by:

Akshay Ramesh

Published on:

19 Jun 2026 10:28 IST