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The next year Lemmerer took him to his first race, in Austria. “I was very inspired by it,” Keshavan says.

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He picked Keshavan to join a luge training camp, which began with a film screening of Olympic luge highlights, complete with dramatic crashes, followed by “Cool Runnings,” the 1993 Disney movie about the Jamaican bobsled team. But if the sport was to remain in the Olympics, it needed to field athletes from more countries, so Lemmerer was searching for them all over the warmer world. Luge is one of three Olympic sled sports (it’s the one in which the racer lies fully exposed, faceup and feet first) and it has always been dominated by Germany, Austria and Italy. Then the Austrian luge champ Günther Lemmerer came to Keshavan’s school to scout for the International Luge Federation. In 1996, the year Keshavan turned 15, he had a reputation as a skilled skier but had no specific ambition. “The worst is the potholes.”) His parents seem to have been as freewheeling as he: His mother is from Italy, his father from the southern Indian state Kerala, and they met while backpacking in the Himalayas in the late ’70s. And he even tried luge - but in the summertime, using a homemade sled outfitted with wheels, zipping downhill on mountain roads. He guesses that he was 3 the first time he skied, on homemade wooden runners. To many ears, the word “India” paired with “sledding” sounds oxymoronic, but Keshavan grew up in the Himalayas, in a mountainside village in the far northern state of Himachal Pradesh. “And this stuff sucks as far as durability.” But a sled he designed, he noted, won the bronze in Sochi. “Some of the materials we use, they’re built for speed, not durability,” Kennedy said, by way of explaining the malfunction of Keshavan’s sled in Calgary. Kennedy met Keshavan just as he was looking for a new job, and he agreed to be Keshavan’s coach - the first individual coach Keshavan had ever had, after 18 years of competition - and to build him his first-ever custom-fitted sled. After retiring, he was its technical director, but four years ago, he and the team had a “bad divorce” after the Sochi Games. In his racing days, Kennedy was one of the best pilots on the United States luge team. They had three days to get the Red Demon’s runners ready in time for another do-or-die World Cup. 11, and we were in the obsessively tidy workshop of the sled builder Duncan Kennedy in Lake Placid, N.Y. Cheerfully handsome - square jaw, long hair, bold eyebrows - Keshavan, 36, is equally easygoing and alert. “This is the Red Demon!” Keshavan said, introducing his sled. It will be his sixth and probably his last. In Calgary, he scored the point that would help him get to this year’s Olympics. It was no crazier than the time four years ago when he fell off his sled midrace and, without noticeably slowing down, got back on it was no harder than 12 years ago, when he ran out of funds and couldn’t compete for two seasons. But for Keshavan, this barely qualified as an impediment. The runners were entirely the wrong size, and he didn’t have time to try them before racing.

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8, just before he was supposed to compete in a World Cup contest in Calgary - a race he needed to complete in order to secure his spot in the Pyeongchang Games - his sled runners cracked beyond repair.Īt the last minute, he borrowed a set of runners (the blades that curve up like ram’s horns from below the luge) from Daria Obratov, a Croatian pilot. Now he finally has a state-of-the-art sled. His competitors traveled with whole retinues of mechanics, psychologists, sponsors and chaperones Keshavan didn’t even have a coach. For his first five Olympics, the Indian luge pilot Shiva Keshavan competed using sleds he had rented, borrowed or cobbled together from parts.