A plump kid took to athletics to lose weight and ended up being India’s first track-and-field Olympic gold-medallist.

Sounds like a fairytale?

That’s Neeraj Chopra’s life actually, all of 23 and a superstar, or dare one say a messiah, that Indian athletics had been waiting for over a century. On Saturday, with his javelin in hand, Chopra was nothing short of a rockstar at Tokyo’s Olympic stadium, which should have been full to capacity to watch his genius unfold but had just a handful officials and coaches to cheer him on thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.