Of all the Bauhaus Gala world stars, Fade is perhaps the least well known of all the others.
Indian javelin thrower Neeraj Chopra has 5.8 million followers on Instagram and 759k followers on Twitter and he beats someone like Mundo Duplantis with a horse length.
– But there are a lot of people living in my homeland, he says.
Yes, when Chopra threw the Olympic gold medal in Tokyo, his homeland exploded in casewhile the rest of the world more or less ignored.
But 1.4 billion people live in India, which is almost twice as much as in the whole of Europe.
It was noticed when Chopra landed in the house.
– Yes, there were thousands of people at the airport already. It was so big back home that it was our first ever Olympic gold in athletics. That’s why everyone celebrated, Chopra says the day before the Bauhaus party in Stockholm.
Throwing 87.58 in Tokyo not only awarded a sensational Olympic gold.
You changed his life.
Just a few hours later, he’s showered with money, as state governments and sponsors try to outdo each other in giving Chopra fat bonus checks.
In the end, he stood with the equivalent of SEK 22 million in total gold rewards, a new SUV from Indian automaker Mahindra, and one year of free air travel from airline IndiGo.
A whole new world for the son of a farmer from Bonipat, who entered the adult world as a severely overweight teenager and weighed 90 kilograms when he was twelve years old.
He used to fiddle and throw rocks at the family’s hives when he was young, which means his father gave him a household spear to throw instead.
Anyway, this is how the success story is told in the Indian press as such after gold.
It’s now been a hit before, with a JVM gold in 2016 and a new junior world record with 86.48.
He also won the 2018 Commonwealth Games.
But none of that came close to an Olympic gold medal in Tokyo in the summer of 2021.
Today, sponsors still go after them, he is regularly seen in TV commercials and has created his own YouTube channel.
The question now is what the World Cup gold will do in Eugene.
India has won one World Cup medal of all time, when Anju Bobby George won the bronze in the women’s long jump at the 2003 World Championships in Paris.