Nadeem’s triumph on Thursday (August 8) in Paris is all the more impressive for a man born and raised in a mud brick house in an impoverished corner of rural Pakistan and forced as a young man to train in local wheat fields with homemade javelins.
“People from the surrounding villages came to watch the match here. We had arranged a big screen. They expressed their joy by chanting, dancing and with fireworks,” his oldest brother Shahid Nadeem told Reuters.
Shahid Nadeem said he and all his four brothers are sportsmen.
“We are five brothers. Two are older than him. We could not afford the expenses to make ends meet. So, we two could not play enough sports. We abandoned our passion and started jobs to support Arshad as much as we could.”
Also read: Arshad Nadeem makes history at Olympics, wins javelin gold for Pakistan
However, Nadeem’s decision to stick with his passion seems set to change the family’s fortunes.
“I am thankful to Allah. I am thankful to Pakistani nation who prayed for my son. I prayed to Allah for my son and Allah gave him victory,” his mother Razia Parveen told Reuters.
She also felicitated defending champion Neeraj Chopra and his family.
“I also congratulate Chopra. I congratulate his mother and his family. Victory and defeat are just by fate.”
Nadeem, 27, married with two children, comes from a poor family of eight children in the central Pakistani region of Khanewal, where he first began to dream of Olympic greatness.
His home, which houses a gym built by Nadeem and his brothers and featuring gear such as iron rods and canisters filled with cement.
Also read: Senate salutes Arshad for clinching Pakistan’s first Olympic medal in athletics
His district barely had reliable water and electricity supplies, let alone proper sports facilities for him to train.
They developed their own weight training apparatus by using iron rods, canisters of oil and concrete.
“His whole exercise gear is lying over there. He used to do his training at a school ground nearby and he used to do pushups at the ground on that backside as you can see there. As I told you earlier, there wasn t any facility for him. He used to do it on a self-help basis. He used to do his training at home or on school grounds,” said Arshad’s brother-in-law, Mohammad Shafique.
Pakistan mostly channels its limited funding for sport into team games such as cricket and hockey.
Nadeem, who compared his Olympic clash with Chopra to the two nations’ legendary rivalry in cricket, has previously said it is challenging being a non-cricket athlete in Pakistan, where resources and facilities for his sport are scarce.
Now his record-breaking 92.97 metre javelin throw in Paris has earned Pakistan its first Olympic medal since the 1992 Barcelona Games and its first gold medal since the 1984 Los Angeles Games.
