Gulmarg (Jammu & Kashmir), Feb 25: In a country where snow is native to the north, Bhavani Thekkeda Nanjunda had to borrow her first winter. Raised in the coffee-scented hills of Kodagu in Karnataka, where red soil and misty mornings define the landscape, snow existed only on television screens.
On Tuesday, at 8,700 feet above sea level, the 30-year-old daughter of a coffee farmer rewrote that geography. Competing at the Khelo India Winter Games 2026 in Gulmarg, Bhavani clinched gold in the Nordic women’s 1.5-km sprint at the Gulmarg Golf Course, adding the title to the two bronze medals she had already won this season in the 15-km and 10-km relay events.
For Bhavani, the victory marked a personal milestone as much as a sporting one. She was 23 when she first encountered snow, learning not just to ski, but to adapt to a silence and cold unfamiliar to someone from India’s deep south.
Crossing the finish line with lungs burning and skis cutting through the snow, she paused to reflect on the journey that brought her there.
“This is for my parents,” she said. “Though I participate in winter sports, my mother and father have never seen snow. I hope they will someday come to Gulmarg, see the snow, and see me win gold.”
Back home, her father continues to tend coffee plants, but it was his belief that nurtured an unlikely winter athlete. With no local infrastructure, no ski culture, and no snow in Karnataka, Bhavani’s pursuit demanded resilience against financial constraints and distance.
She began her sporting journey as a mountaineer in 2014, later becoming a certified ski instructor and transitioning into cross-country skiing.
Bhavani has since emerged as a trailblazer for Indian winter sports. She became the first Indian woman to win a medal at a FIS-accredited cross-country skiing event, securing bronze in the 5-km interval start free race at the 2025 FIS South America Cup in Chile.
She has represented India at the 2023 and 2025 Nordic World Championships and has competed in all six editions of the Khelo India Winter Games.
She credits institutions in Jammu and Kashmir for enabling athletes from non-snow regions to access winter sport training, including the High Altitude Warfare School, the Indian Institute of Skiing and Mountaineering and the Jawahar Institute of Mountaineering and Winter Sports. She also acknowledged the support of the Reliance Foundation, which sponsors six female winter athletes from across the country, including two from Karnataka.
With interest in winter sports steadily growing, Bhavani has welcomed the Jammu and Kashmir government’s plan to train 500 youth annually from across India and has urged athletes from unlikely regions to take up the challenge. “If I could excel despite starting so late, imagine what someone who begins early can achieve with proper training and facilities,” she said.
Her next target is the Asian Winter Games 2029 in Almaty, Kazakhstan. For now, however, her story resonates far beyond the podium — a journey from sunlit coffee plantations in Karnataka to the frozen tracks of Kashmir, proving that in Indian winter sport, the longest distance is often not across snow, but across circumstance.
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