Why Sony was showing track events during Neeraj Chopra's Javelin Throw final at World Championships — Explained

Neeraj Chopra became India's first Javelin Thrower in history to storm into the World Athletics Championships. However, even if innumerable Indians woke up to witness the golden boy in action, they couldn't do so! It was similar to the situation in which all the viewers found themselves during Murali Sreeshankar's Long Jump final.

Chopra's first throw, despite being a fault, was missed by all fans and viewers as the Sony Sports Network was unable to show the feed. This happened quite a few times with the feed inter-cutting between the javelin final and other track-and-field events.

Murali Sreeshankar created history when he finished 7th in Men's Long Jump at the ongoing 2022 World Athletics Championships in Oregon, USA with a best attempt of 7.96m by becoming the first Indian long jumper to compete in the global final.

However, Sreeshankar fans back home in India were devoid of a major chunk of the action when the long jumper was going about his usual business at at the Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon.

While the very first attempt of Sreeshankar wherein he leapt his best of 7.96m was telecasted by Sony, the remaining attempts of the Kerala lad failed to make it to the feed. A lot of heats of multiple track events without any Indian interest took precedence and fans missed out on watching Sreeshankar in action.

Why did Sony show track events instead of Chopra's Long Jump Final?

Well, the answer to this is pretty simple. Sony does not have the official broadcasting rights from World Athletics. They are just subletting the feed from World Athletics' official broadcasters.

This means that Sony does not actually have control on what is shown and they themselves have to rely on the actual global feed to broadcast the event in India. Since the global feed was telecasting track events, Sony had to show track events instead of Javelin Throw Final.