Elite sports can be brutal. The sporting high, attained after years of toil, can be at once fulfilling and fleeting. The craft that hitherto appeared intrinsic can vanish without a trace, leaving the practitioner flummoxed.
Kishore Jena, over the course of 18 months, has ridden this emotional rollercoaster, oscillating wildly between the Hangzhou peak of 2023 to the Paris pit of 2024. From being country's second best javelin thrower after Neeraj Chopra to struggling to hit the 80m mark, J ena's slump has been as stunning as his rise.
As he watched Pakistan's Arshad Nadeem and Chopra battle it out on that memorable night in the French capital, a dejected Jena could only brood over the proverbial what-ifs. "I was in stands that night, and it was surreal to see Nadeem and Neeraj challenge each other. It's the stage every athlete dreams of. I know I could have been there. It was tough to process, to be honest," Jena recalls.
Sport, however, is immune to could-haves and would-haves: Jena's implosion at the grand stage was not sudden. After a memorable 2023 that saw him win the Asian Games silver with a personal best effort of 87.54m, the 29-year-old produced a series of underwhelming results, thanks to a persistent niggle on his left ankle.
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