IN A LEAGUE OF LEGENDS

After yet another path-breaking gold Neeraj Chopra's name is now synonymous with the men's javelin

- Rutvick Mehta

Masses tend to attach faces with track and field events. Bring up 100m or 200m sprints and you'd think Usain Bolt or Florence-Griffith Joyner. Unless, of course, your mind also jumps to Carl Lewis. Bring up 400m and you'd think Michael Johnson. Bring up pole vault and you'd think Armand Duplantis.

Bring up javelin throw and out comes Neeraj Chopra-his strand of hair jumping and pair of legs pounding along with a billion beating hearts back home. That image, no longer bound by the confines of India, has broadened to a global context. If capturing the gold at Tokyo Olympics in 2021 a first in Indian athletics made people sit up and take notice of the steadily rising Indian talent, adding a gold at this year's World Championships-a first in Indian athletics has made people sit back and gape at the scale of Chopra's soar.

Already clubbed with the greatest ever produce in the field of sport from the country, Chopra's triumph on Sunday has only pushed him further towards the finest ever in the field of world javelin.

Jan Zelezny, javelin's recordsetting benchmark considered the greatest of all time by Chopra, backed up his 1992 Barcelona Games gold with the 1993 Stuttgart Worlds title when he was 27. The same age that Andreas Thorkildsen, the Norwegian twotime Olympic javelin champion, backed up his second gold at the 2008 Beijing Games with his Worlds title in 2009 Berlin.