The gentlemen who Urheilu has been trying to interview for a long time, until the matter was finally arranged on Christmas Eve, are sitting in Lahore, Pakistan, with a Google Meets connection that occasionally stutters a little: Arshad Nadeem27, and his coach and manager, 66 years old Salman Iqbal Butt.
The coach has promised to be the interpreter for the Olympic champion who speaks Urdu as his mother tongue.
During the interview, of course, it becomes clear that Nadeem fully understands every question in English and could also operate in the language of Pakistan’s former colonial master if he wanted to.
Coach Butt starts the session with a compliment:
– Arshad has been excitedly waiting for this interview, because he knows that Finland has been the world’s leading country in javelin throwing since the beginning of the 20th century, and even in Paris you had three throwers in the final competition.
Since Nadeem, who turns 28 on January 2nd, is the Olympic javelin champion and World Cup silver medalist, it would normally be clear that he would have already competed several times in Finland, like his peers, the other medalists in Paris, India Neeraj Chopra and Grenada Anderson Peters.
However, his competition statistics for the former superpower of the sport show zero for now.
Was coming to Turku
– We were coming to Turku for the Paavo Nurmi Games last summer, but the old injury recurred in the last practice and we had to miss out, says Nadeem about the matter, which PNG’s CEO Jari Salonen confirm.
The negotiations were well advanced, but the Pakistani’s name had not yet been made public.
– Coming to Finland really interests me a lot, and I want to learn everything possible about Finnish javelin throwing and training conditions in Finland from that trip, says Nadeem.
Which brings us to something that attracted almost as much interest last summer as Nadeem’s freezing 2nd-round throw in the windless, gigantic Olympic stadium of Stade de France: 92.97 is a new Olympic record that took the Pakistani’s all-time record to six.
With such a large one no one in the stadium had thrown this far before.
Where top general athletes usually compete to get themselves in top shape by the time of the season’s prestigious competitions, Arshad Nadeem goes against the grain.
The devout Muslim athlete has a total of less than 30 competitions in the past 10 seasons in the sport’s data Koran, i.e. Statistics Workshop, for comparison Peters has 92 for example.
A special competitive pace
Before the World Cup silver in Budapest 2023, Nadeem had competed once during the season, as well as last summer before the Olympic victory in Paris. Or the Tokyo 2021 Olympic Games, whose 5th place was Nadeem’s international breakthrough.
– Due to my health situation, I haven’t been able to compete abroad as much as I would have liked, says Nadeem, who started his basic fitness season at the Pakistan Olympic Committee’s training center in Lahore in early December.
Coach Butt clarifies the situation.
– Arshad has had to undergo knee surgery twice in Cambridge, England. He was operated on by a doctor of orthopedic surgery Ali Sher Bajwa was also part of our team in Paris. Because of these problems, the number of competitions has remained much smaller than we would have liked.
In the highest doping control
Since it is a top sport of an absolute power sport, skeptics have speculated that Nadeem deliberately avoided leaving his home country for other reasons as well, i.e. to avoid anti-doping activities. However, there is no concrete evidence of this.
The athlete belongs to the most strictly controlled testing pool of World Athletics of the International Association of Athletics Federations and the so-called Adams system, which means that he must report a specific time window every day during which the urine and blood collectors are sure to meet.
On a general level, of course, it is the testers’ job to reach out to the athletes and, if necessary, to their home countries, not the other way around.
– Now everything looks like my health situation will be better next season and I will be able to compete abroad clearly more often and I want to compete, says the father who is devoted to his family of children aged 7, 5 and 1.
If the lengths of Nadeem’s throws, who became Pakistan’s national hero, were judged only based on speed running without seeing where the 800-gram carbon fiber tube punctures the grass, the end result would not be believed by a layman, and not even by those more deeply versed in the sport.
“Funny looking”
The speed running of the Olympic champion is quite a feat, if you compare it to the most well-footed throwers in the sport. But the exterior is deceiving.
– It looks weird in terms of coordination, but during the last two steps, exactly the right things happen in terms of timing. He gets his reach and long draw distance optimally transferred to the spear. The speed is maintained until the impact of the support leg, the support remains straight and the kinetic chain works. It’s about a loop-like throw, not the performance we’re more familiar with, where the impact of the supporting leg is followed by a jerk, explains the javelin coach Petteri Piironen.
– We know that speed running is a development target that we haven’t been able to work with as much as we would have liked due to knee problems. A lot of work is being done with it this training season, says Nadeem.
Everything is relative, of course. The javelin thrower’s development targets are starting to become quite scarce if the Valhalla model, the stiffest and most merciless to physics of javelin manufacturer Nordic, falls to the 93-meter roads in windless conditions and Olympic gold glitters around its neck.
In fact, Nadeem’s pull phase is familiar from a completely different, gigantic sport, which is also very familiar to two other Olympic champions, i.e. Keshorn to Walcott and for Neeraj Chopra: the non-Olympic sport of cricket.
It is along with field hockey By far the most popular form of sport in Pakistan. It is telling that before Nadeem’s gold medal, Pakistan had won eight Summer Olympic medals in field hockey, but only two bronze medals in individual sports. They came from wrestling and boxing decades ago.
Valtikka left Europe
The reception at home was in accordance with it. The son of a large family who grew up in modest conditions in the country no longer has to worry about whether he has enough quality spears, for example.
– My life has changed 180 degrees, and the popularity of javelin throwing has grown enormously in Pakistan.
The Olympic results in Paris bluntly tell in which direction the scepter of a very traditional European sport has shifted. No less than five of the seven best throwers in the final competition of the Olympic Games came from outside Europe, and there is no indication of a break in the development process.
Nadeem thanks two people in particular for getting him into his sport.
– My brother urged me to change cricket to javelin, and my teacher finally made the decision Abdul Rasheed Saqin upon prompting. He was the first person who knew how to teach me how to throw a javelin and I am forever grateful to him.
At least Nadeem’s popularity in Pakistan is not diminished by the fact that the Indian Chopra finished second in Paris. Relations between the two countries are known to be very tense and constantly even threatening war.
At the venue, however, the relationship between the men is relaxed and friendly. Nadeem deftly dodges a somewhat incendiary, politically sensitive question.
No crying over circumstances
– The most important things in sports are hard work, brotherhood and a good spirit. I always want to be a good person first and then a good athlete. In the competition, I never focus on other athletes, but only on my own performance, and I pray to God for strength.
Even Finnish track and field athletes may not always have optimal training conditions in a country with four seasons. Arshad Nadeem and Salman Iqbal Butt, however, are familiar with the javelin throwers’ training opportunities in Finland.
The two burst into laughter when they are asked to compare the facilities of Nadeem’s hometown, Mian Channu in the province of Punjab, with, for example, the Mecca of javelin, i.e. the Kuortane sports college.
– The athlete can focus on doing the best possible work in the conditions he has. Or he can focus on complaining about them. I can’t compare my own starting points to Finland, but I would never have gotten anywhere if I had stuck to that idea. And that’s how it turned out for me.