Eyeing 100 per cent fitness for the next season, India's javelin throw spearhead Neeraj Chopra on Friday (September 27, 2024) said a podium finish in next year's Tokyo World Championships is the biggest target for him currently. (More Sports News)
The two-time Olympic medallist is back home after finishing his season with a second-place finish at the Diamond League (DL) finale in Brussels.
Before that, he had become the first Indian track-and-field athlete to clinch back-to-back Olympic medals by adding a silver in Paris to the historic gold claimed in Tokyo.
"The season is over now. The biggest target for next year is the World Championship, and we will begin preparations for that now. The Olympics are always on our minds, but we have four years for that," the 26-year-old told PTI Videos amid a conference on 'Mission Olympics 2036', organised at the Sports University of Haryana in Sonepat.
The world championship will be held from September 13 to 21 in 2025.
Chopra combatted an adductor muscle niggle all through the year and it also hampered his performance at the Olympics and the DL finale, where he also had a fractured left hand.
The reigning world champion had spoken about consulting doctors at the end of the season to decide whether to go for a surgery to fix the problem.
Chopra downplayed concerns about his fitness and said he will try to improve his technique. The man from Khandra, Haryana is trained by renowned German biomechanics expert Klaus Bartonietz.
"It was an injury-plagued year but the injury is fine now, I will be 100 per cent fit for the new season," he stated.
"Technical issues are also there but we will work on them. I will look to improve my technique. I do like to train in India but when competitions start, I prefer to train abroad," he said.
Talking about India's Paris Olympics performance, where the national contingent yielded six medals but no gold this time, Chopra reflected that the country could have got more, as highlighted by the six fourth-place finishes.
"There were a lot of fourth positions. (But) this time, we had a very good performance in the Paralympics and won several medals.
"In the coming times, we expect strong performances in both the Olympics and the Paralympics," said Chopra.
Chopra has been striving to hit the 90m mark but hasn't managed so far despite coming close. In the Paris Olympics, his silver-clinching throw was 89.45m and he was topped by Pakistan's Arshad Nadeem, who broke the Olympic record with a monster 92.97m effort.
At the DL finale, Chopra threw 87.86m to fall short of the top finish by just one centimetre.
(With PTI inputs)
