Mumbai, June 11 (IANS) Pakistan’s Olympic champion in javelin throw, Arshad Nadeem, will get a financial boost for his sports complex to produce more champions as the country’s government has allocated 50 million PKR (180k US dollars), a news report said on Thursday.

Nadeem stunned the world by winning the gold medal in the Javelin event of the Paris Olympics two years ago, throwing the spear to a new Olympic record distance of 92.97 meters.

Nadeem showed pleasure at the allocation of the budget, a source told www.telecomasia.net. “Let it come to an official announcement, but I have been told about this, and this will be a great boost for the sports complex, which will be aimed at producing future champions,” Nadeem told Telecom Asia Sport.

Nadeem stressed the need for uplifting facilities. “Who can know better than me what facilities mean,” he said. “I have been witnessing how Neeraj and other athletes train and have physically seen their facilities. So, this facility will go a long way in helping us progress and produce more champions.”

The academy will be named Arshad Nadeem-Shahbaz Sharif High Performance Sports Academy and will be developed at the Pakistan Sports Complex. The estimated cost of the project is around 2.85 billion PKR, a figure Nadeem hoped would be raised in a year.

As per details, a state-of-the-art academy to train elite athletes across 10 disciplines, which includes Javelin, Squash, Swimming, Shooting, and Wrestling. The Punjab government is constructing a Rs. 53 million sports stadium in Nadeem’s hometown of Mian Channu, which will also help groom Javelin players.

“We need to give international-level facilities to our athletes if we want to produce champions like India, China, Japan, and other Asian countries have done,” Nadeem was quoted as saying in the report.

After performing Hajj, Nadeem is back to training with the aim to win at the Commonwealth Games (July 23 to August 2, Glasgow) and Asian Games (September 19 – October 4). Arshad Nadeem was forced to withdraw from the 2023 Asian Games in Hangzhou due to a chronic right knee injury, with Chopra defending his title. Nadeem, though, will defend his title.

He won the men’s javelin gold medal at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, setting a new Games record with a mammoth throw of 90.18 meters, famously securing the top spot and becoming the first South Asian to cross the 90-metre barrier.

–IANS

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