Olympic gold winner Neeraj Chopra to get ₹6 cr, Class-I govt job: Haryana CM

“We will be building a Centre of Excellence for athletes in Panchkula, where he will be the head if he wants. He will be given a plot with 50% concession, like other players,” he also added.

Meanwhile, Punjab CM Captain Amarinder Singh announced a special cash reward of ₹2 crore for Neeraj Chopra, a serving soldier of Indian Army, who has made India proud by winning the nation’s first-ever Olympic Gold medal in any discipline of athletics.

Moreover, Manipur Cabinet also decided to honour Chopra by extending a reward of ₹1 crore, tweeted CM N Biren Singh.

Earlier today, Khattar had also announced that Haryana Govt will give ₹2.5 crore, a govt job, and a plot of land at 50% concession to wrestler Bajrang Punia for winning bronze medal at Tokyo 2020. An indoor stadium will be constructed in his native village Khudan in Jhajjar, he added.

Bajrang Punia will return from Tokyo with a bronze medal on Olympic debut after outwitting Daulet Niyazbekov in the men’s freestyle 65kg play-off here on Saturday.

Chopra on Saturday became only the second Indian to win an individual gold in the Olympics, out-performing the field by some distance to immortalise himself as the first track-and-field Games medal-winner for the country.

The 23-year-old son of a farmer from Khandra village near Panipat in Haryana produced a second round throw of 87.58m in the finals to stun the athletics world and end India’s 100-year wait for a track and field medal in the Olympics.

Brimming with confidence with hardly any nerves on display, Chopra walked in like a rockstar to make the Tokyo Games India’s best ever Olympic outing in what was the country’s final competitive outing at the ongoing edition.

His was the country’s seventh medal and first gold in this Olympics and he joined shooter Abhinav Bindra (2008 Beijing Games) in an elite and very hard-to-reach club of India’s individual gold winners in the showpiece.

With this, the country surpassed the previous best haul of six medals achieved in the 2012 London Games. Apart from Chopra’s gold, India have won to silver and four bronze medals.

No Indian has won a medal in athletics since the country started taking part in the Games in 1920 in Antwerp, Belgium.

Three track and field athletes were part of the five-member team — the other two being wrestlers — in that Games.

The International Olympic Committee still credits Norman Pritchard’s 200m and 200m hurdles silver medals in the 1900 Paris Olympics to India though various researches, including the records of then IAAF (now World Athletics), showed that he had competed for Great Britain.

Pritchard was not an Indian and the country’s first Olympic participation under a national Olympic body was in 1920.

Since then, track and field athletes have been an integral part of Indian contingents in almost all the editions of the Games.