Bengaluru: Shiva Keshavan grew up in the Himalayas, in Manali, where his father ran an adventure sports company and organised treks. When he started skiing, Shiva had to walk up the mountains because there were no ski lifts. He worked as a mountain guide and pursued an advanced course in mountaineering. Eventually, luge – a sport in which athletes lie on their backs and race feet-first down an ice track – became his calling, and Shiva went on to compete in six Winter Olympics (the only Indian to do so), turning into something of a mascot for an unlikely tropical country.
At 44, Shiva finds himself back at what he calls his “roots” in a sport making its debut at this Winter Olympics in Italy. Ski mountaineering – or SkiMo – is the newest Winter Olympic sport, and Shiva, who was appointed Head of Sports and Events at the International Ski Mountaineering Federation (ISMF) last year, is part of the core organisational leadership team that’s overseeing its initiation into the Games. He is the only Indian in this cohort.
“I began following SkiMo when I realised it’s going to be part of the Games. It was like going back to my origins. It was an open application process so I sent in my CV as a professional, and went through a couple of rounds of interviews. My experience in sport development in India and being a former athlete who is known internationally, helped I suppose,” said Shiva, who is in the northern Italian town of Bormio which is hosting the Ski mountaineering events. “It’s quite an insane sport if you think about it. It’s both speed and endurance. These are probably among the fittest athletes I’ve seen.”
SkiMo arrived at the Winter Olympics for the first time on Thursday in Bormio, in the heart of the Lombardy Alps – with athletes gathering at the foot of the famed Stelvio slope, sprinting uphill on skis fitted with climbing skins before taking their skis off, sticking them to their backpacks and switching to boots to hike up a flight of stairs, all of it while braving a snowstorm. Once they reached the top, they jumped back into their skis, peeled off the skins and raced downhill. The individual sprint has a total ascent of 70 metres and a course length of 610 metres and the transitions come with time penalties in the instance of breach of rules. A typical individual event – racing, transitioning, lung-busting – lasts around three minutes.
For the first time in its history, the Winter Olympics has two host cities – Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, over 400 kilometres apart, 15 competition venues and six Olympic villages. It’s also the first time since 1998 (his Games debut) that Shiva isn’t in the vicinity of a luge track. “Since the venues are so far apart, I had to make do with watching the luge races live on TV and speaking to my former Italian contemporaries, who are now here as coaches, over the phone,” says Shiva, who was born to an Indian father and Italian mother. “It was also great to see the Indian team in proper uniforms, kitted out in technical wear, perhaps for the first time. It’s something I never experienced in my time (Shiva participated in his final Games in 2018). We were pretty much on our own – we’d go pick up something to wear, often stitching the logos on ourselves.”
For someone who spent the greater part of his career, training and hunting for sponsors with the Games at the heart of his efforts, this year’s edition hasn’t been all pleasant surprises. “The decentralisation of the Games makes sense from a sustainability perspective but it also takes away from the atmosphere of an Olympics. The Olympic Village is a kind of utopia – where athletes from different sports and countries live together and share meals. It’s challenging to achieve that in the current hosting set up of the Games.”
Ski mountaineering runs from February 19 to 21, wrapping up the Games, and Shiva believes that, in many ways, it’s the perfect winter sport for India – primarily because the infrastructure needed is minimal.
“For skiing, you need to create $50 million worth of ski lifts, and the slope needs to be certified. For luge, there’s probably a $100 million investment needed to build an artificial luge track. Ski mountaineering is the kind of sport that doesn’t demand that sort of infrastructure or those conditions. You can use a virgin mountain slope — set it up, conduct the event and leave the mountain just as it was. Here at the Games, the slope that was used for the Alpine skiing events is being repurposed for ski mountaineering. Back home, we have the Himalayas, which are almost perfect for SkiMo.”
