The small company of Indian athletes who have risen to be World Champions or got the World No 1 ranking would be delighted to receive Olympic Games Javelin Throw champion Neeraj Chopra as the newest addition in their midst. It is easy to imagine them being dignified, sober, calm, graceful and proud in extending him a warm welcome. And, he respectfully reflects them all.
Indeed, one must resist the temptation to go overboard in welcoming the latest Indian entrant to a small club of World No. 1. Each Indian athlete who has ever occupied the World No. 1 spot in one’s own discipline has brought some amazing qualities to the table and deserves immense respect for their roles in India’s growth as a sporting nation.
India has celebrated being home to a number of individual athletes who have been World Champions or attained the World No. 1 rank in their respective disciplines, going back to Billiards ace Wilson Jones in 1958. Each one has been special and it would be unfair to peg Neeraj Chopra’s rise to World No. 1 as the pinnacle of sporting achievement by an Indian sportsperson.
The World No. 1 rank sneaked in last week, almost without any fuss. His five best ranking events in the past year have been the World Championships, the Diamond League Final last year and three Diamond League events in Lausanne, Doha and Stockholm. Though he produced his personal best of 89.94m in Stockholm, the second place finish gave him the least score.
Knowing Neeraj Chopra, he will be well aware of how the ranking system functions, the performance score being a total of position score adding to the result score from each of the competitions. The World No. 1 rank is a just reward for his consistency in the big meets, for his unflappable temperament and innate ability to deliver good performances when it matters.
Of course, he will also be aware that though Grenada’s Anderson Peters, the man he displaced at the top, lost out only because one of his five top performances came in the Commonwealth Games where the position score is not as rewarding as in the Diamond League contests and the World Championships.
Above all, the 25-year-old from Panipat knows that this is not a perch but a milestone on his journey in search of evolution. And that he will have to keep striving to stay injury free and perform to potential in each of the competitions that he chooses to enter. He has managed to deal with all kinds of pressure admirably so far and remains committed to his pursuit of excellence.
Neeraj Chopra, fourth at the launch of the IAAF World Rankings in January 2019, dropped out of the rankings list in July 2019 because he was recovering from injury and had not taken part in five events in the previous 12 months. He staged a return to the charts at the 18th spot on June 22, 2021, and, riding on the Olympic Games victory, rose to the fourth spot by the year end.
He breached a new frontier for Indian track and field athletes by securing the No. 2 spot on August 30, 2022, with a silver medal show on July 23 when challenged by a hamstring issue in the World Championships in Eugene and backing it up with a victory in the Lausanne Diamond League a month later.
Viewed from a larger perspective, the fact that India has two other athletes in the top 10 of their respective disciplines – M Sreeshankar at No. 6 in men’s Long Jump and Annu Rani at No. 10 in Women’s Javelin Throw – and five others in the top 20 augurs well for track and field sport in the country.
Praveen Chithravel and Eldhose Paul are World No. 12 and 14 respectively in men’s Triple Jump, Avinash Sable is 13th in men’s 3000m Steeplechase while Rohit Yadav and DP Manu are ranked 15 and 17 in men’s Javelin Throw. And there are at least four other athletes in the top 30 bracket in their discipline.
The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF, as World Athletics was then called) quickly gave up an attempt to maintain World Rankings from the dawn of the new millennium. But a little over a decade later, it tweaked the system bought from All-Athletics.com and launched its own official World Rankings system in 2019 to reward consistency and competition over a year.
Before that, fans of the sport relied on the World Ranking produced by Track and Field News since 1947. A brainchild of Cordner Nelson, the Track & Field News World Rankings was the most definitive work on the subject. Czechoslovakia’s Jan Popper began producing women’s World Rankings in 1956 and it was in the early 1980s that Track and Field News embraced them.
Surfing through Track and Field News, one becomes aware that marathon runner Chhota Singh, the first track and field athlete from independent India to compete in the Olympic Games and the winner of the 1951 Asian Games gold medal, was the first from the country to find a place in the top 10 by being ranked seventh in 1951.
The legendary Milkha Singh was ranked fourth in 400m in 1958 and 1960 and ace 110m Hurdler Gurbachan Singh Randhawa ninth in 1964 after his fifth place finish in Tokyo Olympic Games. In the 70s, the 800m runner Sriram Singh was the only Indian to make it to the top 10, being ranked eighth in 1976.
A drought over a quarter century ended when Long Jumper Anju Bobby George was ranked 4, 5 and 4 in successive years from 2003. Discus Thrower Krishna Poonia achieved a high of World No. 9 in 2012. The legendary PT Usha missed out on a top 10 place though she strode the Asian circuit like a colossus.
While Race Walker KT Irfan rose to being in the top 10 in 2012, it was up to Vikas Gowda to keep India in the mix with four successive appearances in the top 10 from 2012, rising to sixth in 2015. Avinash Sable’s presence in the Track and Field 3000m Steeplechase top 10 in 2022 ended a long wait for a track star since Sriram Singh.
It may be a while before India finds another World No. 1 but it must cherish and celebrate the lad who sends the spear flying long distances but remains beautifully grounded and responsible.
This piece first appeared on RevSportz
