Arshad Nadeem Wins Gold Medal for Pakistan
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FOOLS_NIGHTMARE
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Arshad Nadeem is departing for Pakistan standing with our Ambassador to France Mr Asim Iftikhar urf Chuddu, my former class fellow.
ghazi52
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From mud-brick house to Olympic podium, Arshad Nadeem is Pakistan’s unlikely hero
Arshad had still been training with substandard javelins just months before the Paris Olympics, until a last-minute appeal saw the govt step in to help, his mother says.Reuters | Dawn.com
August 10, 2024
Arshad Nadeem’s hometown erupted into rapturous celebrations after he clinched Pakistan’s first Olympic medal in athletics, winning gold in the men’s javelin and knocking defending champion Neeraj Chopra of India into second place.
Arshad’s triumph on Thursday in Paris is all the more impressive for a man born and raised in a mud-brick house in an impoverished corner of rural Pakistan and forced as a young man to train in local wheat fields with homemade javelins.
The news of his victory, which reached Pakistan late at night, thrilled his compatriots, drawing congratulatory messages from the nation’s leaders and prompting jubilant dancing and fireworks in his normally sleepy home village of Mian Channu.
“We have not been able to sleep since last night because relatives, the media, friends, fans and state functionaries are constantly visiting us to congratulate the family,” his oldest brother Shahid Nadeem told Reuters on Friday.
Pakistan mostly channels its limited funding for sports into team games such as cricket and hockey.
Arshad, who compared his Olympic clash with Chopra to the two nations’ legendary rivalry in cricket, has previously said it is challenging being a non-cricket athlete in Pakistan, where resources and facilities for his sport are scarce.
But now his record-breaking 92.97-metre javelin throw in Paris has earned Pakistan its first Olympic medal since the 1992 Barcelona Games and its first gold medal since the 1984 Los Angeles Games.
“This gold medal is a gift from me to the entire nation on the occasion of Independence Day (on August 14),” Arshad said in a post on social media platform X.
Arshad will receive a hero’s welcome when he returns to Pakistan, with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif likely to welcome him home, Mohammad Shafiq, head of Pakistan’s Olympic Commission, told Reuters from Paris.
Arshad, 27, married with two children, comes from a poor family of eight children in Punjab’s Khanewal, where he first began to dream of Olympic greatness.His district barely had reliable water and electricity supplies, let alone proper sports facilities for him to train.
“Initially, we improvised homemade javelins by using long eucalyptus branches with iron tips on their ends. The fields in our village served as our training ground,” his brother Shahid said.
“We developed our own weight training apparatus by using iron rods, canisters of oil and concrete.”
The situation improved when Arshad joined the local power utility Wapda, which had its own sports facilities.
Even so, Arshad had still been training with substandard javelins just months before the Paris Olympics, until a last-minute appeal saw the government step in to help, his mother Razia Parveen told Reuters by phone.
“The government sponsored javelins and other facilities for him. He brought back three new international standard javelins from South Africa,” she said.
“I am very happy for Arshad and Pakistan… I offered prayers to thank God immediately after his victory,” she said from their home, which houses a gym built by Arshad and his brothers and featuring gear such as iron rods and canisters filled with cement.
Shahid Nadeem said all four brothers are sportsmen.
“My two younger brothers and I abandoned our passion and started jobs to support the family,” he added.
However, Arshad’s decision to stick with his passion seems set to change the family’s fortunes.
Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz has announced a cash prize of Rs100 million ($359,195) as a reward for what she said was his “hard work”.
The Sindh government, Karachi Mayor Murtaza Wahab said, has also announced Rs50m for the national hero. Punjab Governor Sardar Saleem Haider Khan pledged a cash reward of Rs2m while his Sindh counterpart Kamran Tessori vowed Rs1m.
“Arshad is living proof that there’s nothing you can’t accomplish when you dream big, train hard, and never give up,” said the US Embassy in Islamabad in a post on X.
ghazi52
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Arshad’s Olympic gold should be a watershed moment for sports in Pakistan
A star is born
Editorialugust 10, 2024
PAKISTAN’S hopes of returning with anything from Paris — most importantly, a first Olympic medal in 32 years — had rested squarely on the broad shoulders of javelin thrower Arshad Nadeem. And how he delivered.
With an Olympic record throw of 92.97m, the 27-year-old from a village near Mian Chunnu became Pakistan’s first-ever individual gold medallist at the Games. He made history in the French capital by winning Pakistan’s first Olympic gold since 1984, when the country’s hockey team triumphed in Los Angeles. It was the first medal of any colour since Barcelona 1992, when the hockey team bagged the bronze. Arshad’s feat, therefore, makes him arguably Pakistan’s greatest-ever Olympian.
Arshad had to take the hard route; he had to make do with substandard facilities and few funds, at one time even struggling to get a javelin. But at the Stade de France on Thursday, with the eyes of the world on him, he put behind the hardships and physical toll, having undergone surgeries on his elbow and leg in the last few years, to shine through and put Pakistan on top of the javelin podium. It was remarkable.
For an athlete whose international participation has been few and far between, who has struggled to regularly compete during athletics’ marquee Diamond League season, unlike the rest of the field, Arshad ended the contest on the biggest stage of them all with just his second throw, beating the Olympic record by some distance and leaving his rivals trailing. The universe seemed to have aligned for Arshad’s moment of magic, Pakistan’s moment of glory, the relentless pursuit of gold by a single man from a country of over 235 million coming to fruition. So how will Pakistan now preserve and boost its national treasure?
Cash prizes have been announced left, right and centre, but the question is: why did Arshad not receive this support when he needed the funds most — prior to the Games? Why does the country and its government wait for something to be achieved before springing into action? Why does it not strive to create these moments of national glory?
Arshad later pointed out the absence of world-class training facilities in Pakistan, and the fact that he had one camp in South Africa and only one Diamond League meet in the lead-up to the Games. This, despite the fact that Arshad had already proven his talent when he speared his way to the Commonwealth Games gold in 2022, before winning a silver medal at the World Athletics Championships last year.
Arshad’s gold should be a watershed moment for sports in Pakistan. It should force a rethink by the government and the sports authorities about how to better fund Pakistan’s athletes, because it is they who deliver the glory.
Published in Dawn, August 10th, 2024
FuturePAF
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Along side rebuilding our politics and economics, Pakistan needs to re-commit to building back its sporting prowess of decades past.
Now that the GWOT is over and we are on our own (being left to ourselves) we can learn to tell our own story once again (as the “Crossroads of Asia”), and with the help of sports (and other cultural exports), rebuild our global image and in soft power.
I hope they leave Arshad Nadeem to sports and molding the next generation of athletes. Even though he himself is only 27. They should be weary to try to co-opt him, or else he could become another athlete turned politician dynamo that gets out of their control. He is more valuable and useful as a pure sportsman, especially for being a global goodwill ambassador of the country, via sport. The Olympic gold medal carries with it a currency few other positions do. Pakistan would be wise not to squander or cheapen this accomplishment.
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Nilgiri
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Yah some while back I was chatting about my own athletics memories at various schooling levels with my mom....as she told me my PE teachers said I was "smart" at pacing my long distance running and so on. I explained her few details of what they meant....past my greater participation/ability in things like cricket, hockey, badminton, volleyball and so on.
That's when she told me something I never knew before (this late in life, she still has new stories about herself for me heh).... that she had a real knack for the long jump....that her PE teacher was amazed she was "that good" and wanted to send her to national events etc...but in end my mom faced severe dissuasion on this from both her parents (my grandparents)....and really whatever she had was squandered, she never got the chance to see what she could do here...i.e to know her true max frontier here.
It wasn't some village environment, my grandfolks (bless them, they were imperfect but did great job as a whole and I miss them) were urban middle class for the time.
This happens all across the subcontinent, especially for girls/females....but for pretty much everyone in village environment even more so.
It felt bad to hear, but glad she opened up to me on this....and that's one more part, more personal one to me, to what I mean by defeatist narrative that needs to be broken, these are shackles in society as well and not just from govt apathy.
So thats why the rays of hope we do see that get past this are really important, because it gives someone for regular folks to point to and increase their bargaining power to try move some levers more easily than before.
Of course it doesn't go for just sports, but for general human endeavour to make full use of what you got inside you to succeed. There needs to be good role models and examples out there to really push that into the next gear for the collective.
@Joe Shearer may enjoy reading this whole thread from start to finish.
silicon0000
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Purely unconditional 
loves for both prayers.
loves for both prayers.
The SC
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Pakistan’s Arshad Nadeem just broke the world record. He’s from a village called Mian Chunnu, whose residents pooled in money so he could train. He had next to no support from any officials. He had to appeal for funds to buy a new javelin to prepare for these Olympics after his previous one was damaged beyond repair after he used it for a decade
silicon0000
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Not True. Wrong Information.
He got training in Mauritius in 2016 (Age 19) and in South Africa in 2022.
He had 6-7 international standard Javelin provided by Pakistan Sports Board and He also has Toyota International Sponsorship.
Pakistan Sports Board spend more than 20 million (20 crore) rupees on Arshad Nadeem. Around 10 million for his treatment, 5 million each on winning gold in common wealth games, and silver in world championship and rupees 1 million each in winning 4 other medals.
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