WINTER SPORTS OUT IN THE COLD

Despite the participation of several Indian athletes, the Asian Winter Games held in Japan this February did not even make it to news bulletins, let alone prime-time slots.

Winter sports athletes in India are struggling for recognition, government funding, honest administrators, corporate sponsorship infrastructure, television visibility and mass public support.

“Crowd-funding has come to my aid in recent times and that’s how I raised money for my trip to Sapporo, Japan, for the Asian Winter Games,” says India’s ice skating champion, Vishwaraj Jadeja. Pursuing his dream to be an Olympic champion, the 30-year-old weaved his way from India to Netherlands to live and train with the Dutch national ice skating team. It was an expensive affair that paid off—his skating improved as a result.

He’s not alone. India’s women’s ice hockey team, four-time Winter Olympian luge racer Shiva Keshavan, Alpine skier Himanshu Thakur, Gulmarg-based skier Arif Khan and Kashmir-based snow-shoe racer Tanveer Hussain—whose recent crowd-funded trip to the US ended in embarrassment after his arrest on charges of sexual abuse—have all faced difficulty financing their careers.

But the rot runs deeper than that. Shiva and other Indian athletes attended the opening ceremony in Sochi under the banner of ‘Independent Olympic Athlete’ in 2014, when the Indian Olympic Association had been suspended for appointing a corruption-accused official as president. Himanshu only received his gear a few days before the competition, when the suspension was lifted.

“My only outlets to vent frustration in this matter are to skate better and urge the mainstream media to rake up this issue consistently,” says Vishwaraj, who aims to be the first Indian athlete to participate in the upcoming Winter Olympics as an ice skater and Summer Olympics as a Tri-athlete.