HANGZHOU: When Neeraj Chopra's first attempt in his Asian Games title defence saw his javelin sailing past the 85m mark on Wednesday here, the common thought that ran across the stadium here was "that could be 90m". For around 12-15 minutes after that, the Olympic and world champion's followers world over kept pressing refresh button to know the official distance. But what came instead was the next athlete on the list who went ahead with his throw while Neeraj hung around the technical desk.
To everybody's bewilderment, Neeraj took off on the runaway once again for 'another' first attempt and came up with an 82.38m throw. He eventually did his season's best of 88.88m on his fourth throw to defend a title for the first time at a multi-disciplinary event.
But that was not the only story of the evening.
