Neeraj Chopra, who won India’s first-ever athletics gold medal at the recently-concluded Tokyo Olympics, on Thursday urged people to not “further vested interests and propaganda” after his comments regarding Pakistan’s javelin thrower Arshad Nadeem during the finals of the quadrennial event were blown out of proportion on social media. In a recent interview with The Times of India, Chopra revealed that he wasn’t initially able to locate his javelin during the event because Nadeem had been “moving around” with it before his first throw. “I was searching for my javelin at the start of the final (in Olympics). I was not able to find it. Suddenly, I saw Arshad Nadeem was moving around with my javelin. Then I told him, ‘Bhai give this javelin to me, it is my javelin! I have to throw with it’. He gave it back to me. That’s why you must have seen I took my first throw hurriedly,” Chopra was quoted as saying by The Times of India.
After his comments, fans took to social media to question Nadeem’s intentions with some reports even claiming that the Pakistani athlete was trying to “tamper” with Chopra’s javelin. Now Chopra, took to Twitter to explain the whole situation and asking people not to spread rumours. In the video, he addresses the issue saying that an issue has been made of when he said that he got his javelin from Nadeem and is being "blown out of proportion" whereas it was a very simple thing. He then explains that everyone's personal javelins are kept in the centre of the field and all the throwers are allowed to use those such are the rules, further stating that there is nothing wrong in the fact that Nadeem used Chopra's javelin to practice and then he asked for it back. He then said that there was no "big deal" in this and that it is sad that they're using his own name to make an unnecessary issue of it, and he requested people to not do such things. India finished Tokyo Olympics with a record medal haul of seven, including one gold, two silvers and four bronzes.