The lonely mission of Indian who plays most dangerous winter sport

In India, the people who have brought attention to any sport have been individuals who have gone on their own lone journey: Keshavan

For his first five Olympics, the Indian luge pilot Shiva Keshavan competed using sleds he had rented, borrowed or cobbled together from parts. His competitors traveled with whole retinues of mechanics, psychologists, sponsors and chaperones; Keshavan didn’t even have a coach. Now he finally has a state-of-the-art sled. But on Dec. 8, just before he was supposed to compete in a World Cup contest in Calgary — a race he needed to complete in order to secure his spot in the Pyeongchang Games — his sled runners cracked beyond repair.

At the last minute, he borrowed a set of runners (the blades that curve up like ram’s horns from below the luge) from Daria Obratov, a Croatian pilot. The runners were entirely the wrong size, and he didn’t have time to try them before racing. But for Keshavan, this barely qualified as an impediment. It was no crazier than the time four years ago when he fell off his sled midrace and, without noticeably slowing down, got back on; it was no harder than 12 years ago, when he ran out of funds and couldn’t compete for two seasons. In Calgary, he scored the point that would help him get to this year’s Olympics. It will be his sixth and probably his last. But he’s willing to play it by ear.

“This is the Red Demon!” Keshavan said, introducing his sled. Cheerfully handsome — square jaw, long hair, bold eyebrows — Keshavan, 36, is equally easygoing and alert. It was Dec. 11, and we were in the obsessively tidy workshop of the sled builder Duncan Kennedy in Lake Placid, N.Y. They had three days to get the Red Demon’s runners ready in time for another do-or-die World Cup.

In his racing days, Kennedy was one of the best pilots on the United States luge team. After retiring, he was its technical director, but four years ago, he and the team had a “bad divorce” after the Sochi Games. Kennedy met Keshavan just as he was looking for a new job, and he agreed to be Keshavan’s coach — the first individual coach Keshavan had ever had, after 18 years of competition — and to build him his first-ever custom-fitted sled.

“Some of the materials we use, they’re built for speed, not durability,” Kennedy said, by way of explaining the malfunction of Keshavan’s sled in Calgary. “And this stuff sucks as far as durability.” But a sled he designed, he noted, won the bronze in Sochi.

To many ears, the word “India” paired with “sledding” sounds oxymoronic, but Keshavan grew up in the Himalayas, in a mountainside village in the far northern state of Himachal Pradesh. He guesses that he was 3 the first time he skied, on homemade wooden runners. And he even tried luge — but in the summertime, using a homemade sled outfitted with wheels, zipping downhill on mountain roads. (“There have been mishaps,” he says. “The worst is the potholes.”) His parents seem to have been as freewheeling as he: His mother is from Italy, his father from the southern Indian state Kerala, and they met while backpacking in the Himalayas in the late ’70s. In 1996, the year Keshavan turned 15, he had a reputation as a skilled skier but had no specific ambition. Then the Austrian luge champ Günther Lemmerer came to Keshavan’s school to scout for the International Luge Federation.

Luge is one of three Olympic sled sports (it’s the one in which the racer lies fully exposed, faceup and feet first) and it has always been dominated by Germany, Austria and Italy. But if the sport was to remain in the Olympics, it needed to field athletes from more countries, so Lemmerer was searching for them all over the warmer world. He picked Keshavan to join a luge training camp, which began with a film screening of Olympic luge highlights, complete with dramatic crashes, followed by “Cool Runnings,” the 1993 Disney movie about the Jamaican bobsled team. “I was very inspired by it,” Keshavan says. The next year Lemmerer took him to his first race, in Austria. Keshavan promptly broke his foot — and scored a good-enough time that Lemmerer thought he could qualify for the Olympics the following year. And then there he was, all alone in Nagano, Japan, the only Indian in the 1998 Games, the only Indian ever to qualify for luge and, at 16, the youngest luge Olympian in history.

Four years later, the Italian luge team offered Keshavan full use of its world-class coaches and facilities, an off-season job in the Italian police and eventual citizenship if he agreed to compete under their flag. Keshavan never even considered it. “For me the dream was to get the Olympics to my hometown,” he says. “And that was the only reason I was doing it. To show that we are also here.” Keshavan has never won a medal in the Winter Olympics — no Indian has. But he is the reigning Asian champion of the sport, winner of 10 Asia Cup medals and holder of the Asian speed record (83.5 miles per hour). When he went home to India after winning his first gold in the Asia Cup in 2005, “the entire town had a holiday,” he says. “They all carried me along the main street, throwing flowers.”

In theory, the Winter Olympics is a global event. But winter is not a meaningful seasonal category for nearly half the world’s countries. And nearly half of the countries of the world have never competed in the Winter Games. Of the 22 Winter Olympics, India has sent athletes to only nine, at two of them represented by a team consisting only of Shiva Keshavan.

Without institutional support, Winter Olympians from the so-called smaller nations have to hustle year-round just to train. This year, one Jamaican bobsledder is literally having a bake sale, peddling banana bread to raise funds. In the off-season, Keshavan works as a waiter and pizza chef in the Italian restaurant his parents run near their Himalayan town. He has had few sponsors, and only since 2008, when Coca-Cola first paid him to carry around a branded bottle for the season. Otherwise, like many of his equatorial peers, he crowdfunds online. “It’s awkward,” he says. “But it has to be done.”

I asked him what sort of support he gets from the Indian Olympic Association, and he practically did a spit take. “In 20 years, the Indian Olympic Association hasn’t given me a dime,” he said, laughing. Two months ago he emptied his bank account and maxed out his credit card to keep touring, continuing only because the Indian government’s ministry of sports agreed at the last minute to cover $8,000 of his debt. He had been fruitlessly petitioning them for help for five years. Once, he said, “they actually asked me to get a certificate to prove that Winter Olympics is on par with Summer Olympics.”

India, the second-most-populous country in the world, is the absolute worst at the Olympics in general, with the lowest number of medals per capita. Indian Olympic officials sometimes seem determined to embarrass their country’s athletes. Two years before the 2014 Games, the Indian Olympic Association was suspended from the Games over a corruption controversy, and Keshavan had to walk in the opening ceremony as an “Independent Olympic Participant.”

“There used to be some ridiculous stories in the newspaper like, ‘We are genetically not sporty,’ ” Keshavan says. “But anybody can do it. I think you can literally pick anybody with some aptitude from the street, and within eight to 10 years you can turn them into a world-class athlete. But still we don’t have that mentality in India.” Indian sports officials, he says, “want you to first win something on your own. They actually tell me, You win an Olympic medal, then we will start. At that point I won’t need any funding! But that’s the way it’s been: In India the people who have brought attention to any sport have been individuals who have gone on their own lone journey.”

The Indian novelist Amitava Kumar has written beautifully about the agony and ecstasy of being an Indian Olympics fan, so I called him to ask about Keshavan. In part, Kumar’s love of India at the Olympics seems akin to that of a Chicago Cubs fan before 2016: an almost masochistic revel in the heart-rending pathos of the seemingly permanent underdog (a sentiment that Bollywood sports films, he noted, exploit to the maximum). But it’s also a desire to recognize the genuine achievement even of those who never medal. He raved about Dipa Karmakar, who became the first female Indian Olympian gymnast despite having only minimal gymnastics facilities in her hometown, and who is known for performing a vault so dangerous that American Olympians refuse to attempt it. And he recalled watching the silver-winning performance in women’s badminton of P.V. Sindhu as “an extraordinary experience — not least because my daughter said, ‘Dad, I’d love to play badminton.’ My God. Look at what a transformative, electric effect P.V. Sindhu has on other Indians — especially other Indian women.”

But Keshavan’s lonely luge mission, he said, while clearly impressive, “has that quixotic element to it which makes him more in line with another phenomenon — which is of Indians entering the Guinness Book of World Records in vast numbers.” As in, most consecutive yoga positions on a motorcycle. Largest gathering of people dressed as Mohandas Gandhi. Longest ear hair. Kumar wondered whether Keshavan’s career fit into this tradition of willfully perverse feats: “The country burns with heat, but no — let me go and do something in snow.” And, like the Jamaican bobsled team, Keshavan is often treated as nothing more than a novelty. But when you meet him it’s immediately evident that there is nothing of the sideshow or the contrarian about him. He can’t help that he’s in love with a sport that doesn’t match the clichés about his country.

Keshavan says that some of his competitors treated him with “a little bit of disdain” until he proved himself. This is partly understandable, given the phenomenon of “Olympic tourists”: The Sochi Games, for example, included a wealthy but incompetent couple who had purchased citizenship on the tiny tropical island of Dominica, probably just to gain Olympic entry. But the treatment of unlikely entrants can be rough. “People weren’t used to seeing a brown guy,” Keshavan says of his early years in competition. “Anything different — automatically, you’re singled out.” White athletes often called him “black guy” or “Taliban.” “It never got to me,” he says. “It made me want to prove myself that much more, actually.”

But such comments are an additional endurance test that white athletes never have to pass. I spoke to Seba Johnson, the first black female skier ever to participate in the Winter Olympics, who competed as an Alpine racer for the United States Virgin Islands. She first skied on a family trip to Switzerland when she was 5. “I looked up at my mom and told her I wanted to be a skier,” she said, “and it just turned out that nine years later I was at the start gate of the Olympics.” The year was 1988, and at 14, Johnson was the youngest Olympic skier in history. “I was such a kid,” she said. “I was just full of life, I wanted to do such a great job in a sport that had my heart.” Soon after she arrived at Calgary, a Canadian Mountie stopped by the athletes’ village to inform her that she had been receiving death threats. The Mountie gave her one such letter, she said, which said that “I should go back to the Virgin Islands with the rest of those niggers, and I’m making a fool of myself.”

“It was a lot to deal with,” she said. “But I had to stay as positive as possible back then, because ski racing is 98 percent mental.” Her mother tried to shield her from the continuing hate mail, but she finally retired from competition in part because of an abusive letter she opened in 1992 upon her return to her college dorm room after participating in her second and final Olympics. She remembers six letters “that really hurt — hurt me to the core,” she said. “Then again, I was also getting a lot of good letters from kids around the world saying they wanted to be like me when they grow up. Unfortunately, I didn’t internalize those.”

Keshavan attributes the “little remarks” his fellow racers made to competitiveness rather than discrimination, and says he no longer hears them. “Now I think I’m friends with everybody,” he says. But he mentions that luge season often brings him to small Alpine towns where the atmosphere can be tense for an athlete of color. In 1993, in Oberhof, Germany, Keshavan’s coach, Duncan Kennedy, was beaten bloody by 15 Nazi skinheads while trying to prevent them from attacking his lone black United States luge teammate. Such experiences are rarely discussed. The Olympics loves a good adversity story — but racial adversity is treated as a settled matter, as if Jesse Owens banished it from the Games in 1936.

In the early evening I drove with Keshavan up to the luge track, which snakes over 23 acres on the side of Mount Van Hoevenberg, looking from the outside like an unusually meandering aboveground oil pipeline. Keshavan took a walk down the full mile of the artificially refrigerated track to refamiliarize himself with its 20 curves: the sequence called Devil’s Highway, which ends in a hairpin; the zigzags known as the Labyrinth. I declined to join him, given that walking on ice has only ever brought me pain and humiliation, but Keshavan declared the conditions excellent.

He explained that when you’re lying on your back while hurtling down a tunnel of ice, you can see more than you’d think. But luge is based more on feeling than seeing. You learn how to respond to the G-forces, and vision just acts as confirmation. Luge is the fastest sport on ice, the only Winter Olympic game timed to thousandths of a second. But the beauty of the experience is in the relativity of the speed: When you’re doing it, it feels slow. When he’s off the track, he performs “mind runs” in his imagination, thinking through the track even faster than it goes in real time, which has the effect of slowing time down even more when he races. And if the sled looks as if it’s floating as it goes, that’s because it is: He estimates that 70 percent of the time, he’s airborne.

Luge is also one of the most dangerous winter sports. Keshavan’s suit is made of fire-retardant material, but when he nudges the wall, he often gets a burn. Keshavan’s injuries also include stress fractures, damaged ligaments, a compressed vertebra and a herniated disk. These, he says, are “part of the sport.” Dying shouldn’t be, but sometimes it is. Hours before the 2010 Vancouver Games, Keshavan had just completed a training run when a Georgian luge pilot, Nodar Kumaritashvili, flew out of the track at over 89 m.p.h. and crashed fatally into a steel pole. And yet the most important thing a luge pilot must do is relax. “If you’re relaxed,” he said, “you can absorb the bumps, absorb the imperfections of the ice, and still keep your direction.”

Keshavan excels at relaxation. When Kennedy became his coach four years ago, one of the first pointers he gave him was that his feet were so relaxed they were getting floppy, which was disrupting his airflow. He noticed, too, that Keshavan tended to twist his body and throw the sled off-balance. When Keshavan told Kennedy about tweaks he was thinking of making to his sled, Kennedy said: “Good. We did this 15 years ago. You’re thinking in the right direction.” So many of Kennedy’s recommendations, Keshavan says, were “these small things that are actually basics of the sport. Some things that I should have known when I was 16, I learned a lot, lot later.”

Keshavan is sledding faster than he has ever sledded before, but he’s thinking of retiring from competition to focus on cultivating the next generation of Indian winter athletes. “I can’t campaign for the sport and train,” he says. “You just can’t do both.” He runs a talent-scout program for Indian luge pilots; around 200 Indian kids have attended his luge training camps. “Sometimes I get heartbroken,” he says, “that these kids that I’ve trained, I put the seed in their head that they can do something for the country and have this kind of a life” — but then when it comes time to travel to a real luge track to train and compete, there’s no funding to make it happen. “Now I’m a lot more cautious when I promote this,” he says.

Three days after we met, Keshavan raced in the Lake Placid World Cup. Once again his runner broke just before his turn, and once again he managed to eke out a point. His next race was in Oberhof. “Picked up a couple of hairline fractures on my hand,” he updated me by email. He seemed unworried. And then came some unexpected good news: Two weeks before the opening ceremony, the Indian ministry of sports announced that it would give Keshavan another 1.5 million rupees, or around $23,500, to pay for his trip to Pyeongchang. The money would cover only a fraction of the debts he was continuing to accrue for his training, his travels and Kennedy’s salary. But he’d take it as far as it could go.