As the Paris Olympics winds down with the realisation that, godly miracles aside, the Tokyo haul ain't gonna be crossed, allow us to digress with this question: Where, in any discussion around the most momentous athletic achievements by individual Indian Olympians, does Neeraj Chopra stand?
Neeraj is the third Indian to win individual medals at two consecutive Olympics. Wrestler Sushil Kumar (bronze Beijing 2008, silver London 2012) set things off and was followed by badminton player PV Sindhu (silver Rio 2016, bronze Tokyo 2020). Neeraj's ongoing collection is a droolworthy gold (Tokyo 2020) and silver (Paris 2024.) Plus, Paris has given us another individual Indian Olympic first - double medals in a single Games by Manu Bhaker. What if she medals in LA 2028? Does she topple all these other great names of multiple Olympic medallists?
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But what decides the best of the best? Is the colour of medals a starting point? Do we get to pick which sport gets preference over the rest in a ranking? How about being first, like Sushil? How does that hold up against being the first woman, as Sindhu was? Plus, do not forget, as Lakshya Sen certainly won't, what it means to pick yourself up from a semi-final defeat and find a way to extract something from what feels like a cruel Games.
GOAT arguments that seek single answers across sport are eventually pointless. The passage of time from the first great achievement to the latest does not follow a straight line. As the physicists say, time is a fabric anyway, that too elastic. Elite sport is, if you like, a lycra universe.
Where in this moving, supple Indian sporting universe do we place Neeraj and the silver? Suffice to say, Indian performances in individual sport will from now be measured on the Chopra scale. His parameters are excellence, consistency and success - on the highest platform. When it comes to platforms and heights, the Olympics is where arguments stop.
We learnt much about Neeraj from this silver. On the Thursday night javelin final, Pakistani Arshad Nadeem's 92.97m knocked every other contender sideways. It was the javelin's biggest throw for more than two years, the third furthest anyone has thrown in the post Zelezny era. What was not seen on the TV world feed was Neeraj's first response - he broke into spontaneous applause, appreciative of what had just been achieved, even while realising that his work was cut out for the evening.
Then he went to work. His reply - a season's best 89.45m, the second-best throw of his life in the only legal throw he recorded in Paris - was spirited, but well short of Arshad by a good 3.53m, almost 11 feet. Close to two Neerajs in height.
His applause for Arshad and the work ahead at hand are two separate but equally important parts of Neeraj's sporting life. He is aware of his place in contemporary India as a celebrity proselytiser of his sport. He is the rare athlete unafraid to use his stature and success as a springboard to speak above the toxic noise of social media and hyper nationalism. Neeraj acknowledges the fraternity Arshad and he share, as athletes and also as geographical and cultural brethren. The French even have the most moving words for this. Each to the other is, to borrow from T S Eliot's The Waste Land, mon sembable, mon frere. My likeness, my brother.
On Thursday night however, the Stade de France was all business.
This is not the first time Neeraj had finished second in a major competition - in the 2022 Eugene World Champiohships, Neeraj trailed Paris bronze medallist Anderson Peters, 88.13m to 90.21m, a difference of 2.08m/81 inches. The following year, Neeraj was to win gold at the 2023 Budapest World Championships, with 88.17m.
If there is anything that has marked Chopra's progress post-Tokyo, it is his ability to turn up at the big events with the closest approximation to an A-game and fight to get to the top of the podium. In Paris, Neeraj was trying to find an in to get closer to that A-game. His pride as an exceptional athlete demanded that he get as close to Nadeem as possible, but his body, handling an adductor muscle injury, did not respond as he wanted it to.
What we've normally seen of Neeraj is his relaxed competition-face, secure in the confidence of his skills and the body's ability to respond. His Paris face was that of problem-solver, dissatisfied and annoyed that time and opportunities were running out. It didn't matter that the closest anyone was to his silver was Peters on his fourth throw (88.54m), 91cms behind. Or that only one other man in the competition crossed 88m. The medal was secondary, he was looking for more distance out of that javelin and more velocity from that body. When he finished the competition without that happening, Neeraj accepted the result with composure and posed for photographers, usually high beam smile down low.
It was as if he had channelled his inner Ravi Dahiya, the wrestler who met reporters in Tokyo 2020 with his Olympic silver in his pocket. Smiles cracked? Zero. Neeraj was to say later, "Best wahi tabhi hota hai joh national anthem bajwaa paayein lekin yeh bhi joh hai, yeh bhi bahut achcha hain (the best is when you are able to get the national anthem played, but this that has happened now is also good)."
The standard Neeraj has set himself has moved beyond individual achievement or public adulation. After Tokyo, he competed in 16 events, won nine and finished second in seven. Still, he remained underwhelmed after his second place in Paris, his Olympic Games silver, philosophically saying, "results sports main up down hote rehte hain..." Results in sports go up and down, he said. At which point it appears rude to ask whether an Olympic silver for an Indian athlete could actually be marked as a down.
Except the Chopra scale operates without precedent, convention or the limitations of national imagination. Even as his achievements keep piling up, clearly Chopra doesn't take his own publicity machine seriously. There are many qualities that made Chopra an unprecedented kind of back-to-back double Olympic medallist.
While he is an Indian Olympian, he is also a high-performance athlete searching for a greatness we never even realised we were capable of. The greatness which is also an appetite, a hunger that needs to be fed. After the Paris final, he tried to explain it to us with his everyday earnestness, about the throws that he knew his body and its wretched adductor contained. "Bahut achchi throw lagni baaki hai... andar bahut distance bacha hai ..." There is a good throw still to be thrown, inside there's lot of distance still inside.
"Silver accha hai. Lekin jab tak andar se woh bachi hui throw, woh nikal paayegi, tab tak woh khushi nahin zaahir kar paaonga." The silver is good. But until that throw inside me doesn't get out, I won't be able to express its happiness.
In his pursuit of the perfect distance, Neeraj Chopra is light years ahead of the boundaries of Indian sport.