Neeraj Chopra Classic 2025 Live Updates: Bengaluru set for inaugural NC Classic showdown with Neeraj and Co in action
Chopra expressed immense joy at seeing his vision come to life, recalling his inspiration from watching elite javelin throwers train. 'If I talk about the business side, for me right now the only aim is to make this event a success. That is my focus. That the NC Classic is happening, that in itself is a big thing. Rest of the things don't matter now. I want to promote the sport,' he said on the eve of the inaugural NC Classic.
Chopra certainly wouldn't want anybody to mistake the hospitality for a lack of competitiveness in a year where he has hit new heights quite literally, having breached the 90-m mark at Doha Diamond League meet. With wins in the Ostrava Golden Spike and the Paris Diamond League, Neeraj is primed for a special home win at the Sree Kanteerava Stadium in a competitive field.
NC Classic 2025 Start List
Neeraj Chopra (India)
Curtis Thompson (USA)
Martin Konecny (Czechia)
Julius Yego (Kenya)
Cyprian Mrzyglod (Poland)
Luiz Mauricio da Silva (Brazil)
Rumesh Pathirage (Sri Lanka)
Thomas Röhler (Germany)
Sachin Yadav (India)
Sahil Silwal (India)
Rohit Yadav (India)
Yashvir Singh (India)
The impact of a 90-m throw: Rohler, Yego explain the body dynamics
World champion Neeraj Chopra cleverly avoided a question about consistently throwing 90 meters, deflecting it to veteran javelin throwers Julius Yego and Thomas Rohler. Chopra himself cleared the 90-meter mark at the Doha Diamond League in May. Before Yego and Rohler could elaborate on the challenges, Neeraj light-heartedly stated, "They are better people to answer."
Indeed, among the athletes at Saturday's NC Classic, Yego and Rohler are the two seasoned members of the exclusive 90-meter club. Rohler, who achieved 90-meter throws seven times before a back injury sidelined him, is currently on a comeback. He emphasized the significant physical toll a 90-meter throw takes on the body. (READ MORE)
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Mint
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How did Indian wrestling go from the best in the world to murder and sexual harassment allegations in ten years?
My enduring memory of Sushil Kumar, the wrestler who won two Olympic medals and became one of India's greatest sporting icons, comes from a time before his spectacular downfall as an accused in the murder of another wrestler (for which he spent four years in jail as an undertrial before being granted bail in March. It comes from that magic hour in an akhada, when, between the long, frenzied mat sessions in the morning and the never-ending, arduous physical conditioning workout in the evening, there is a happy lull—a time for food that always tastes delicious because the body is craving it, for meaningless banter (my memory is from pre-social media days), and extremely well-earned sleep, or in the words of the wrestlers, 'ghoda bech ke so gaye" (sold his horses and went to sleep). In Kumar's life, there were a couple of more things that happened during this four-hour rest and recovery period—as the 'saviour" of India's great tradition ofkushti, he had, for a controlled half-hour, a stream of visitors, and for another half hour, an interview with me for the book on Indian wrestling I was working on. We kept to this routine for nearly three months, sitting in his rundown room under the rafters of Chattrasaal Stadium in Delhi, curtains drawn against the sun outside, a small refrigerator, balanced on a pair of bricks, humming away in one corner, the smell of muscle spray and sweat, and the two of us talking about wrestling till he couldn't keep his eyes open any more. 'I'm giving you everything I've got," Kumar once told me. 'This (interviews) is harder than fighting!" Inevitably, just a few minutes before 4pm, a bunch of children would barge into the room—'Wake up, it's time. You said you'll train with us. Wake up!" Kumar would open his eyes with difficulty, squinting at the gaggle of eight-and-ten-year-olds, and sigh deeply. Later, on the mat, he would teach them moves, then allow himself to be taken down by them, feigning amazement that a child could throw him, to the unfailing delight of the kids. The year was 2012—an incredible time for Indian wrestling, when Kumar's two consecutive Olympic triumphs, and Yogeshwar Dutt's bronze, had lifted kushti from its rural roots to nationwide prominence. The four years (2012-16) that it took me to research and write Enter the Dangal, I was immersed in India's deep and varied culture of kushti at the precise moment when it was engaged in an epic tussle between tradition and modernity, between the akhada mitti and the sudden, if much needed introduction of Olympic mats across akhadas rural and urban. I had a ringside view of the immense upheaval triggered by the brave women and their families who decided to smash the gender divide in a sport that had been a carefully guarded male bastion for all of its hundreds of years of recorded history, and saw girls taking their first steps on a wrestling mat in far-flung villages, first in ones and twos in the face of fierce opposition, and then in droves after Sakshi Malik became the first Indian woman wrestler to win an Olympic medal in 2016. I stayed with the Phogats in their (then) idyllic village Balali, and watched a teenage Vinesh teaching her even younger sisters technique on the mat, including a little girl called Ritu, who loved climbing trees to pluck guavas, and who would later become India's first woman competitor in MMA. I was thrilled and awed by the speed, precision, and power that Vinesh generated—she looked small and thin off the mat, but turned into an unstoppable tornado on it—and I knew that she was going to do something big in the world of wrestling. There were so many new experiences, so much to learn: about the life of the itinerant wrestler, fighting in dust-swirl dangals amidst fields of wheat, and washing off at the nearby pond, the same way they have been doing it for hundreds of years. About the life of Ghulam Mohammed, aka the Great Gama, who every wrestler in India knows as the 'greatest wrestler to ever come from India". Gama was a phenomenal mat artist who remained unbeaten in his life in the early 20th century and was celebrated by the maharajas as well as the British during his career, but who died in obscurity in Pakistan, all but forgotten in real life even as his legend lived on. I learnt of the deep religious significance of wrestling in Hindu culture, of Hanuman as the patron god of the martial art, of akhada mitti in Varanasi where Tulsidas claimed Hanuman walked on himself, and the correct way to care for akhada mitti—cleared of all debris and tilled to fine loam, with mustard oil, rose petals, and turmeric water swirled in. Things that, along with wrestling techniques, can be found in courtly manuals written as far back as the 9th or 10th century (evidence of wrestling's cultural significance in the subcontinent is far older than that, dating back to at least the 5th century BCE)—techniques that are all very much still in use in modern freestyle wrestling. Almost a decade later, where does Indian wrestling stand now? This is a difficult, complex question to answer. On the one hand, the access to modern training facilities has gone up exponentially. 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Yet, Kumar's fall from grace from being India's greatest Olympian to a murder accused with clear connections to gangsters took away some of the aura and claims to spirituality that kushti once had. If women entering the world of kushti was a remarkable act of defying and fighting patriarchal opposition, the women who made it happen took their fight to a whole new level when theyaccusedthe powerful strongman politician and then head of Wrestling Federation of India, Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, of sexual abuse. When they found that the federation, the sports ministry and the police intractable, Vinesh, Sakshi and others took to the streets, spending months protesting, braving police action and a system which, at first, tried its best to suppress them, got taken down in a stranglehold, and forced to conduct a police investigation that revealed the extent of Singh's sexual offences. 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'Where previously there was only wrestling, now there are tennis courts, golf courses, cricket academies, shooting academies…one of the brightest shooters we have right now, Shuruchi Phogat (no relation to Vinesh) switched to shooting from wrestling, and her father was a wrestler. The way every kid in Haryana went into wrestling during Sushil's time, that just won't happen now." This access to more sports facilities, as well as money and comfortable lifestyles, Selvaraj says, will make it harder for the wrestling culture to hold on to its pre-eminence in places like Haryana. 'Because, face it, wrestling is an insane sport," Selvaraj says. 'No other sport demands as much time and sacrifice. It is physically and mentally harder than any other sport. It requires a tremendous amount of input—of years and years of intense training that leaves time for nothing else, starting from a very young age—for very little and very unpredictable outcomes. So, you can't just create wrestlers with programmes and money, you need that intense, deeply entrenched culture. And that culture in India is probably eroding." It reminded me of a dangal I attended with a wrestler called Satbir, who I followed for an entire dangal season for my book. The tournament was being held in a village called Tungaheri in Punjab. Satbir and I sat in the shade of a peepul tree next to a pond as he waited for his bout. Children were frolicking in one corner of the pond. In another corner, a few women were scrubbing down their buffaloes. 'Better to sit here than watch the kushti," Satbir said, taking me by surprise. All I knew of him, all I had seen, was him training and fighting. 'I do it for the money, and nothing else. If I could make the same money some other way, I would do it and leave this. I have started asking around with former pahalwans in Delhi who run real estate businesses." This is just a polite way of saying 'gangsters". 'But what about becoming an international wrestler?" I ask. 'I don't care about it," Satbir said, and then pointed to the children in the water. 'I'd rather swim here than fight." Rudraneil Sengupta is the author of The Beast Within, a detective novel set in Delhi and Enter The Dangal: Travels Through India's Wrestling Landscape
Indian Express
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The Mighty Minions who ruled badminton doubles
Lee Yang and Wang Chi Lin never reached World No 1 in men's doubles. Their best was #2 in September of 2022, and you could say that a shorter turnaround between Tokyo and Paris might just have helped when they went on to win back to back Olympic titles, on either side of that ranking high. There were absences from the circuit which might have cost them some connect and popularity with fans around the world, though. But they showed up when it mattered in an Olympic-heavy sport like badminton, winning gold in 2021 and 2024. On the other end of the spectrum are Indonesia's hugely popular Kevin Sanjaya Sukamuljo and Marcus Fernaldi Gideon, the Minions. They ruled the ranking charts as World No 1s for a mighty 272 weeks according to Tracker MS/WS, starting mid-2017. But never could nail down a medal of any colour at the World Championship or the Olympics in what remains the biggest mysteries of badminton. The Minions era, though, that took them past the doubles heyday of Lee Yong Dae was when the sport earned itself a TV audience, thanks to their playing style. Fast, flat, ridiculously talented, enviably deceptive, the Indonesians became fan favourites, drawing an entire generation towards doubles between 2016 and nearly 2022. The wow moments never stopped when Kevin-Marcus played, and their matches got watched in Live stadia and on television for the skill and speed rush they offered as they went about stringing together an incredible number of titles. It wasn't a smashathon or the European or Chinese way of bombarding opponents with big hits, but racquetwork that explored ludicrous hitting angles, clinically elevated heart rates if those watching and undoubtedly left opponents scratching their heads, and in turn bolstering their own games to counter that barrage. Kevin was the little maestro at the net, and Marcus no less talented with his creative game, that took badminton beyond realms of medals, titles and legacy calculations. Ben Beckman lauds the #BadmintonIcon that is 🇮🇩 Kevin Sanjaya Sukamuljo. Happy retirement, legend. 🫡 — BWF (@bwfmedia) May 17, 2024 Like Wiaan Mulder, the South African who simply refused to hack down Brian Lara's 400 score, unmindful of whether anyone would remember him 50 years hence without the statistical milestone (or just confident that he will get the mark against an Australia or England), the Minions legacy too will not get pinned to a point in time. A date. A number. A picture on the podium. A trivia question. There's a continuum to their emergence, the years they dominated and faded out, imprinted at best in youtube rabbit holes. Eye-poppingly, none of their 37 finals on the World Tour or in the Super Series era were against the double Olympic champions, Taiwanese Lee-Wang. History will look at the equally talented but not as consistent Lee-Wang with awe, but those who followed badminton in those 2016-2021 years will not quite easily forget the headrush and racing heartbeat and completely messed up breathing patterns of when they watched Minions play. And to think they followed right after the peak of perhaps the finest and most respected men's doubles players, Hendra Setiawan and Mohammed Ahsan, also Indonesians. The 272 weeks when the Minions ruled, winning close to 30 titles, including Asian Games and All Englands, however will remain a statistical hallmark. Always asterisk'd by why they never got anywhere near the annual World Championship or Olympic medals in all these years. On the cusp of World No 1 next are Koreans Seo Seung-jae and Kim Won-ho, who have played half the tournaments (9) most others have in the ranking period, add to the slightly mental ways in which men's doubles has ebbed and flowed – or whirlpooled with no one quite dominating for long. As per Tracker MS WS, the next best amongst the contemporary pairings have been Chinese silver medallists from Paris, Liang Wang (48 weeks), compulsive All England winners Alfian-Ardianto (37 weeks), Danish fighters, Anders Rasmussen & Kim Astrup (24), Asian Games champions Satwik Chirag (18) and Japanese former World Champions, Hoki-Kobayashi (14). Malaysian Ong-Teo were on 8 weeks before being upstaged. It's a little like the golden period of women's singles, though not as prodigious and delightful. But there's serious talent in that bunch, and skills that make up for the absence of the Minions. To add to the continuing adoration of mens doubles, Lee Yang and Wang Chi Lin too played some very eclectic badminton to win their Olympic golds. But quiz any upcoming men's doubles shuttler from any part of the world in the continental junior meets underway, and they would tell you what an indelible mark the Minions left. The gold and podiums were not quite nailed, and they couldn't quite put the ring on Olympic greatness. The era, though, firmly belongs to the mighty Minions.
