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India’s brightest medal hope Shiva Keshavan finished at an underwhelming 37th position after the fourth and final run of the men’s luge event at the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia, thus ending his Olympic campaign on a disappointing note. There were 39 participants in the event, which means Keshavan was quicker than just two other athletes in the competition.
The 32-year-old actually did fairly well in the fourth run, clocking a time of 53.335 seconds. However, coming as this did on the back of two less-than-sterling times, particularly in the second run, Keshavan’s overall time wasn’t enough to get him into the top 30. He finished with a time of 3 min 37.149 seconds, which was 9.623 seconds slower than the time of leader Felix Loch from Germany.
Loch (3 min 27.526 sec) walked away with the gold medal, while Albert Demchenko of Russia (3 min 28.002 sec) and Armin Zoeggeler of Italy (3 min 28.797 sec) took home the silver and bronze medals respectively.
This was Keshavan’s worst-ever performance at an Olympics event – he had finished 28th in Nagano (Japan) in 1998, 33rd in Salt Lake City (USA) in 2002, 25th in Torino (Italy) in 2006 and 29th in Vancouver (Canada) in 2010.
Still, taking into account the obstacles that Keshavan had to face to even get to the Games, the fact that he actually managed to put in a completed run is worthy of praise. Keshavan has been competing under the IOC flag rather than the Indian tri-colour because of the suspension of the IOA.
Keshavan had been the talk of the town at the Games because of his miraculous escape during his practice run last week, during which he displayed incredible calmness to avoid getting seriously injured despite falling off his sled at high speed. Even if his final performance wasn’t good enough to win him a medal, his heroics during that practice run will ensure that he will be remembered by the global spectators for a long time to come.
All Indian eyes will now turn to Himanshu Thakur and Nadeem Iqbal, the two other Indians who are participating in the Games.
