From mud brick house to Olympic podium: Arshad Nadeem is unlikely Pakistani hero

Agency :

Arshad Nadeem’s home village 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 arch-rival India into second place.

Nadeem’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 sport into team games such as cricket and hockey.

Nadeem, 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 Aug. 14),” Nadeem said in a post on social media platform X.

Nadeem, 27, married with two children, comes from a poor family of eight children in the central Pakistani region of 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,” brother Shahid said.

“We developed our own weight training apparatus by using iron rods, canisters of oil and concrete.”