Maiden film on luge pilot debuts at cine fest today

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Most individual sport is a lonely business. Ask long distance runners, swimmers, golfers, even those who have taken to tennis or any other court game, and by and large they will say that when the chips are down, it is up to them, and them alone.

In this category also come most winter sports, and when you are talking about such an athlete aspiring to make it big on the international stage, it can be an extreme struggle in isolation.
Such is also the story of one of India’s most remarkable sportsmen. Shiva Keshavan is also one of the country’s least celebrated achievers. The sole reason behind this is that luge pilot Shiva is his country’s best winter sports athlete.
In luge, the fastest and most dangerous of sliding winter sports, Shiva has found the passion of his life. He lives and trains in a town and a country where there is not a single luge track.
Still, Shiva has competed in four Winter Olympics, holds the Asian speed record for the luge and won a gold medal at the Asia Cup in 2011. When he took part in the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, at 16 he was the youngest-ever Olympic luge pilot.
This son of an Indian father and an Italian mother grew up with the Himalayas as a backdrop and found in them the oxygen he needed to reach for the skies. He took from the mountains fortitude and determination and learnt how to overcome every obstacle in his path.
He once refused an offer to represent Italy in luge and uses the twisting, hair-pin bends on the roads that dot his native Himachal Pradesh as a modified luge track. He now has others aspiring to follow in his footsteps despite the odds.
Shiva’s tale has been captured on camera by sports writer-turned-filmmaker Jasvinder Sidhu in a short film, “An Unsung Shiva From the Himalayas”, which has been selected for the Delhi International Film Festival that begins on Friday in the Capital. It is Sidhu’s directorial debut.
Interestingly, like his film’s subject, Sidhu, better known as Jassi or Jas, also feels that sport is like oxygen for him, having played hockey in school and college, and a keen amateur cricketer.