JAVELIN: THROW AND TELL.

Pakistan's top javelin thrower, Arshad Nadeem, created history at the recent World Athletics Championships in the Hungarian capital of Budapest. His silver medal in javelin throw was Pakistan's first medal in the history of the biennial track and field World Championships.

The 2023 edition had an estimated TV viewership of one billion people. A record total of 2,100 athletes from 195 countries competed in the Championships and were watched by more than 400,000 ticketed spectators from 120 countries. Arshad's silver put Pakistan in the 27th position on the medals table.

It is arguably, one of Pakistan's finest sports achievements of this century. We have no medals in hockey, neither the World Cup, nor the Olympics. In squash, no Pakistani has made it to the final of the World Open or the British Open. In cricket, too, there has been no appearance at any of the 50-over World Cup finals.

And it is in these times that the 26-year-old, 6'2' tall phenomenon from tehsil Mian Channu, in District Khanewal, appeared on the scene.

'I come from a humble rural background,' Arshad Nadeem tells Eos.

Eos meets up with star javelin thrower Arshad Nadeem for a brief tete-a-tete

'In school I even played cricket, like most boys. But I also indulged in other sports, such as kabaddi, football and, luckily, athletics. Ours is a farming family. I also worked in the wheat and cotton fields. But cricket is a time-consuming sport and affected my work on the farm.

'When I started excelling in throwing events at athletics, especially in javelin, my elder brother advised me to concentrate on athletics, as it consumed less time than when I played other sports,' he says.

And in javelin, Arshad won at every level - at the union council, at the tehsil, the district, the division and the province. When he became the national champion in 2015, Arshad was just 18.

'The same year, I was offered a job by Wapda, the top employer of sportspersons in Pakistan. Wapda looks after all sportspersons employed with them very well. I owe a lot to my Wapda coach Fayyaz Hussain Bukhari, who mentored me till the 2021 Olympics,' he says.

Coming on to the international scene, Arshad made an immediate impact there, starting out by winning bronze at the 2016 South Asian Games in the Indian city of Guwahati. At the 2017 Islamic Solidarity Games, his bronze was again Pakistan's only individual medal in athletics.

His performance showed constant improvement. He was eighth at the 2018 Commonwealth...