Gulmarg, Feb 25 (JKNS): In a country where snow falls like a birth right, Bhavani Thekkeda Nanjunda had to borrow her first winter. She grew up in the coffee-scented hills of Kodagu, Karnataka where the earth is red, the mornings are misty, and snow exists only on television screens.
She was 23 the first time Bhavani felt the sting of ice on her cheeks, before she learned how silence sounds different when it’s blanketed in white.
On Tuesday at the Khelo India Winter Games 2026 in Gulmarg, at 8700 feet above sea level, the 30-year-old daughter of a coffee farmer became the queen of sprint.
Bhavani surged to gold in the Nordic women’s 1.5 km sprint at the snow-covered Gulmarg Golf Course, adding the title to her two earlier bronze medals in the 15-km and 10-km relays this season.
When Bhavani crossed the finish line on Tuesday, lungs burning, skis carving their final arcs into Gulmarg snow, it was more than a victory. It was a reckoning with geography, with doubt, with destiny.
She looked up at the mountains, then down at the snow underneath her feet.
“This is for my parents,” Bhavani said. “Though I participate in winter sports, my mom and dad have never seen snow. I hope they will someday come to Gulmarg, see the snow, and see me win gold.”
Back home, her father tends to coffee plants. But it was he who cultivated something rarer: belief. When winter sports seemed like a fantasy for a girl from the deep south, he backed Bhavani’s chase. No snow. No local tracks. No culture of cross-country skiing. Just a dream and a stubborn refusal to let it go.
Bhavani is already a pioneer. She became the first Indian woman to win a medal at a Federation Internationale de Ski et de Snowboard (FIS)-accredited cross-country skiing event, clinching 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 competed in all six editions of the Khelo India Winter Games.
But none of that erases the improbable beginning. Bhavani started as a mountaineer in 2014, became a certified ski instructor, learned to glide on surfaces she had never imagined touching as a child. Every step forward meant overcoming financial strain, scarce infrastructure, and the simple tyranny of distance. In Karnataka, there are no ski trails, no frozen mornings, no childhood snow days.
“I myself had not even seen snow till I was 23,” Bhavani said. “If I could excel despite picking up the sport so late, imagine what someone who starts early can do with proper training, coaching, and facilities.”
In Gulmarg, she found mentors and mountains willing to teach her. She credits institutions like the Army’s High Altitude Warfare School (HAWS), the Indian Institute of Skiing and Mountaineering (IISM), and the Jawahar Institute of Mountaineering and Winter Sports (JIM & WS) for opening doors to athletes from places where winter is just a word in a textbook.
Now, she wants more doors opened and points to the Jammu and Kashmir government’s plan to train 500 youth from across the country every year and urges young athletes, especially those from unlikely landscapes, to step forward.
“Interest in winter sports is growing,” Bhavani says.
“The snow is calling farther south than ever before.”
Bhavani also acknowledges the support of Reliance Foundation, which sponsors six girls from across India, one each from Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Maharashtra, Uttarakhand, and two from Karnataka, including her.
Long before she stood atop a podium in Gulmarg, she was a girl in Kodagu inspired by the mountains she saw in the Bollywood film ‘Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani’.
Cinema gave her a glimpse of the highlands, life demanded she climb them.
Next, she has her sights set on the 2029 Asian Winter Games in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Bigger stage, sharper cold, and higher stakes. But for now, the image that lingers isn’t the gold medal. It’s a coffee farmer and his wife, somewhere in the south, who have never touched snow, raising a daughter who has learned to conquer it.
In Gulmarg’s white silence, Bhavani Thekkeda Nanjunda didn’t just win a race. She proved that sometimes, the longest journey in winter sport isn’t across 1.5 kilometers of snow. It’s from a sunlit plantation in Karnataka to the top of the podium on snow in Kashmir. (JKNS)
