Everybody loves a happy ending. It may often be the cliche-est of climaxes — the guy getting his girl, the hero besting the villain, friends getting re-united, problems inexplicably getting solved — but they often have you closing a book or leaving a theatre with a smile on your face.
PyeongChang 2018 was Shiva Keshavan’s happy ending. No, it was not like one of those Bollywood movies where he ended up on the podium, tears streaming down his face as the national anthem played in the background. That was never realistic for someone who, with months left for the Games, was still wondering whether he would get to go.
For years, Shiva was an oddity in Indian sport, for nobody quite understood what he was doing or why he was doing it. Journalists across newsrooms googled ‘luge’ every four years and exasperatedly tried to explain a sport most of them had never seen, to equally puzzled readers. Fans were reminded that the Winter Olympics were a real thing, only to conveniently forget it days later. What few understood was why he was doing it, Games after Games, decade after decade.
The folklore of Kerala, where Shiva’s father hails from, has a character called the Naranathu Pranthan (the madman of Naranam) — a man who spent his days rolling up a heavy boulder up a hill, and then pushed it down. Everyone stood around puzzled, as he did this again and again. There’s more than a passing resemblance to Shiva’s story. It took him four years to push his sled uphill to the Olympic starting line. Then he would go down in it to the bemusement of the few who noticed.
Then he would start again. But 2018 was different. In his sixth and final Olympics, he was suddenly the darling of the Olympic village. The support that he received on the way to Korea — from the government and from sponsors — was the most he had before any Games. In PyeongChang, he became a trending story — the Indian who’d been at it thanklessly for 20 years. Washington Post wrote about him, he appeared on CNN and was featured quite heavily on the Olympics’ official social media channel.
As he geared up for his final run, around 50 screaming fans stood around in -27-degree-cold and waved the tricolor. After his 34th-place finish, he was ushered in to meet the International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach and the International Luge Federation president Josef Fendt. It was almost as if PyeongChang was one huge celebration of Shiva’s career.
“I haven’t read a single article yet,” he laughs. “But this year, quite a few documentaries about me came out. Before, my career wasn’t really documented. There weren’t any videos or picture. I was just doing this alone.”
He thinks of it as a culmination of everything he has done over the last 20 years. “Everyone’s seen me around for a long time now,” he says. “I remember my first Olympics, being fascinated by the cool things at the village, the video games, the virtual reality displays. But over the years, I met people, involved myself in the Winter Olympians Association. So I knew a lot of people there. I was right at home.”
That he finished only 34th bothers him — he feels he could have done much better had luck gone his way. “I fractured my hand with three weeks left for the Games,” he says. “At the start of a run, you pull off with your hand and then you paddle with your fingers. The fracture was right on the tip of my right index finger and my first run at the Games was when I was using my hand for the first time after the fracture. Very predictably, that start went wrong.”
He stops short of saying ‘maybe, next time’, for he has already announced there won’t be a next time. But his resolve seems to have weakened a bit since then. “I can pull off another Olympics,” he catches himself thinking aloud. “It’s not a black-and-white decision. I don’t know...”
Happy? Yes. An ending? Maybe not!
vishnu.prasad@newindianexpress.com