Driving Naari Programme launched in Chandigarh
Pyeongchang, February 10
Indian luger Shiva Keshavan’s 20-year Olympic odyssey comes to an end at the Pyeongchang Games this weekend with a familiar lament about the country’s winter sports apathy.
A teenage Keshavan shot down the luge track on a borrowed sled at Nagano in 1998 and at the age of 36, he will compete in his sixth consecutive Games at the Olympic Sliding Centre.
There will be few compatriots to wish him well in the preliminary runs on Saturday, with cross-country skier Jagdish Singh the only other athlete to qualify from the country of 1.25 billion.
For Keshavan, the face of Indian winter sports for two decades, it has ever been thus.
He was the nation’s sole athlete at the 1998 and 2002 Games and has never had more than a handful of team mates since.
Four years ago at Sochi, he was unable to compete under his country’s flag due to an IOC ban of the Indian Olympic Association for electing corruption-tainted officials.
The ban was lifted during the Games after the Association held another election but not until after Keshavan’s event.
Born to an Indian father and Italian mother in a hamlet in the Himalayas, the luger has relied more on hand-outs than government support to fund his Olympic dreams.
There will be a “little melancholy” involved when he takes his last four runs at the Olympic Sliding Centre.
“It’s hard to give up the sports lifestyle and the Olympic movement, I love it and what it stands for,” he said on Friday. “But I’m sure I’ll stay involved in the sport because I want to build it up in India now and focus on that.”
Keshavan carried India’s flag for a fifth time in the opening ceremony today.
Singh, meanwhile, arrived on time to be a part of the ceremony.
