Meet Bhavani Thekkeda Nanjunda, Who Brings Gold to South from the Khelo India Games in Gulmarg
Suhail Khan
Gulmarg, Feb 26 : Bhavani Thekkeda Nanjunda was 23 years old when she first saw snow. Until then, winter for the girl from Karnataka’s Kodagu district meant mist over the coffee plantations—not ice beneath her feet.
On Wednesday, seven years after that first encounter with frost, the 30-year-old stood on the highest step of the podium at the Khelo India Winter Games in Gulmarg, having won gold in the Nordic women’s 1.5 km sprint. Two bronze medals in the 15-km and 10-km relays earlier this season now have a golden companion.
“I myself had not even seen snow until I was 23,” Bhavani told The Web Story /The Varmul Post after her victory. “If I could excel despite picking up the sport so late, imagine what someone who starts early can do with proper training.”
“You know, when I tell people back home in Kodagu that I’m a skier, they laugh. They think I’m joking. In their minds, snow is something that happens in Manali or in the movies. It doesn’t happen to a farmer’s daughter from the coffee estates. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? The movies are exactly where it started for me.”
She said, “I was watching Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani—I don’t even remember how many years ago now—and there was this scene where they are in the mountains, surrounded by all that white. I just felt this pull. A ridiculous, impossible pull. I had never seen snow. My mother had never seen snow. But something in me said, ‘I need to go there.’”
“So, I told my father. I expected him to say, ‘Beta, be practical. Focus on your studies.’ Instead, he just looked at me and said, ‘If you want to climb, I will hold the ladder.’ That’s the thing about parents from the South who have never seen snow. They don’t understand the cold. They don’t understand the sport. But they understand believing in their child. That is enough,” she said.
“I started with mountaineering in 2014, just to get closer to the mountains. Then I found skiing. I trained wherever they would take me—HAWS, IISM, JIM & WS. I’ve done all six Khelo India Winter Games here. But for the longest time, I was just an enthusiast. It wasn’t until last year in Chile, at the FIS South America Cup, that I became a medalist—the first Indian woman to win a medal at that level in cross-country skiing,” she said.
“Standing on that podium, all I could think was, ‘I wish Amma could see the snow.’ That medal, and this gold today—they are for her. For my father. For every parent in Kodagu or Kerala or Tamil Nadu who has a child with a ‘crazy’ dream about the cold.”
She praised the J&K government for training 500 youth from across the country every year, stating that it is a wonderful start. “But we need scholarships that cover not just equipment, but travel. For a girl from Karnataka, just getting to Gulmarg for practice costs more than her gear. We need winter sports academies to scout talent from non-snow states. The talent is there—we just don’t know what snow looks like until we see it in a cinema hall.”
She further said, “My next target is Almaty 2029—the Asian Winter Games. But more than that, I want to go back home and have one little girl in Kodagu point at a screen and say, ‘Didi did that. Maybe I can too.’ Because the snow is calling—farther south than ever before.”
