This morning Dave McKenna was observing, with great pride, that Ireland had won zero medals at the Winter Olympics—not sure that any added context will help a reader here—so I decided to check in on the status of India's squad. There were only two athletes, both skiers: one in alpine and the other in cross-country. More had been written about Arif Mohammad Khan, the alpine skier from Kashmir, and I soon encountered these curious sentences in his Wikipedia entry:
Khan’s expectation in Beijing was to ski and make it to the finish line.[7] Khan now has his eyes set on the 2026 Olympics.[8][9]
You do not often hear an Olympian's ambitions summarized as "make it to the finish line." Time to consult the 2022 men's slalom results to see if Khan had in fact achieved his goal:
Damn. How about men's giant slalom, which had 46 competitors finish the race?
OK, that's better. Granted, slalom disciplines are challenging enough in their design that finishing the race without missing a gate is a feat unto itself. Khan had perhaps already surpassed expectations by appearing at the Games at all. He learned how to ski in the mountains of Gulmarg, a resort town in the Western Himalayas, where his dad runs a ski equipment store. He started skiing as a 4-year-old, hiking up the ungroomed slopes to ski down them. Inadequate funding, coaching, infrastructure, and political turmoil in the region have all complicated his athletic pursuits, he told Al Jazeera in 2022. "My childhood memories are of gunfights and the sound of grenades and bombs going off," he told Reuters in 2025.
Going into Milan Cortina, Khan sounded optimistic. "Just a week before the Olympic Games, I am committed to my work towards a better improvement for performance in the Olympic Games!" he wrote in late January. Could he improve on his 2022 result? Would he finish?
This time around, he competed in only the men's slalom event. Conditions during Monday's race were conspiring against him: An ongoing snowstorm darkened visibility and had staffers shoveling snow off the course in between runs. The slalom consists of two runs. After the first run, 51 out of the 96 competitors either did not finish or were disqualified. After the second run, four more met the same fate. For many of those skiers, it wouldn't have made much sense to enter the event and not ski aggressively.
Not all competitors share the same goals. Khan, who told 3 Wire Sports that he was experiencing back pain during the Games—35 years old, who among us—took a very deliberate approach down the slope. Having taken a cumulative 48 seconds longer than the gold medalist, he completed both runs without missing a gate. His 39th-place finish, among the 39 skiers who completed the event, was an all-time record for Indian performance in the Winter Olympics, a feat perhaps only made possible by the furious snowstorm. But let us say it again: He finished!
