Melvin Durai
Neeraj Chopra was fairly well-known before this year’s Olympic Games, but winning a gold medal in Tokyo propelled him to stratospheric stardom. He became a national hero and legendary athlete with a single throw of the javelin, and everyone wanted to know everything about him. Where did he grow up? Who were his childhood idols? What did he eat for breakfast? Did he wear briefs, boxers or trunks?
Almost every media outlet in India wanted to interview Chopra and every Indian with the slimmest of journalism credentials wanted to pepper him with questions. It was only a matter of time before someone asked a question that seemed inappropriate to some people. The first person to ask such a question was Navika Kumar of Times Now, who asked the 23-year-old athlete if he has a girlfriend. A girlfriend!
“No, I don’t have a girlfriend,” Chopra responded, adding that he was keeping his focus on sports right now. He seemed unfazed by the question, but others on social media found it inappropriate, wondering what the reaction would be if a sportswoman were asked the same question by a male interviewer. Indeed, a male interviewer would be widely denounced for asking Mirabai Chanu or PV Sindhu, “Do you have a girlfriend?”
In this day and age, we should not be making any assumptions about sexual orientation. We should ask questions such as “Are you dating someone right now?” and “Do you have a significant person in your life other than your coach?” Otherwise, we risk making some people uncomfortable.
But are questions about relationships always inappropriate? Not necessarily. Many athletes are eager to talk about their significant others. It all depends on context. A press conference immediately after an athlete wins a competition is not an appropriate setting for relationship questions, unless you are asking Neeraj Chopra about his relationship with his javelin.
Reporter: “Can you tell us more about your relationship with your javelin?”
Chopra: “Yes, it’s a Valhalla javelin, made by the Swedish company Nordic Sport. It helped me win gold. I love it. It will always have a special place in my heart.”
Reporter: “Do you let other people hold it and throw it?”
Chopra: “Yes, we have an open relationship. We are there for each other, but we are not clingy.”
While many people would consider Navika Kumar’s question fairly innocuous and not an invasion of privacy, the same can’t be said about a question posed to Chopra during a virtual event hosted by The Indian Express. The question came from art historian Rajeev Sethi. Prefacing his question with a compliment (“What a handsome young man you are!”), Sethi said he wanted to ask a question on the minds of crores of Indians: “How do you maintain a balance between your sex life and athletic training? I know this is a weird question.”
It wasn’t just a weird question. As far as I know, it was the weirdest question that has ever been posed to an Olympic gold medallist by an art historian.
Art historians do not usually get the opportunity to question Olympic athletes. The social circles of art historians and Olympic athletes usually do not overlap. Historians generally hang around with other historians, and athletes hang around with other athletes. And now we know why.
Chopra, to his credit, responded politely: “Sorry, sir. I have said sorry, you can know my answer from that.”
Sethi did not give up. He tried to explain why he was asking his question, but that only made things worse. “My heart is overwhelmed by your question,” Chopra said, which was a polite way of saying,
“You have pierced my heart with your weird question.”
As the only Indian to ever win an Olympic gold medal in athletics, Chopra has become a celebrity, but even celebrities deserve some privacy. Do we really need to know about Chopra’s sex life? No, but perhaps the art historian would like to volunteer some details about his.