Tereso (Italy), Feb 13 (PTI) India’s Stanzin Lundup finished near the bottom in the men’s 10km freestyle cross-country skiing event, taking the 104th spot, at the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics here on Friday.
Lundup, whose selection to represent India by an IOA-appointed ad hoc committee was embroiled in controversy, clocked 28 minutes 26.7 seconds to end at 104th out of 111 athletes who finished the race at the Tesero Cross-Country Skiing Stadium.
In total, 113 competitors started in the race and 111 completed it. One did not finish while another athlete was disqualified.
The 27-year-old Indian army man was 7 minute 50.5 seconds behind the Norwegian gold-medal winner Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo who clocked 20:36.2 to win his eighth Winter Olympics gold medal.
France’s Mathis Desloges (20:41.1) won the silver while Norway’s Einar Hedegart (20:50.2) clinched the bronze.
With three races still ahead of him, Klaebo now shares the all-time Winter Olympics record of winning eight gold medals with three other Norwegian athletes who have all retired — Marit Bjoergen and Bjoern Daehlie in cross-country skiing and Ole Einar Bjoerndalen in the biathlon.
The men’s 10km interval start freestyle cross-country skiing is a time-trial race where athletes start one at a time, 30 seconds apart, and freestyle-ski a total distance of 10 kilometres.
Each skier races against the clock rather than directly against other competitors, and their final time is measured from when they leave the start gate to when they cross the finish line. The course includes uphill, downhill and flat sections, testing endurance, speed, and technique. The skier with the fastest overall time wins.
Lundup’s selection by the IOA had been mired in controversy. In a recent order, a single bench of Delhi High Court had held that another cross country skiier Manjeet was more “meritorious” and two places above Lundup in the rankings, and the former’s exclusion from the Winter Olympics was “manifestly arbitrary and unfair”.
However, the IOA submitted to the HC that Manjeet’s name was not in the long list and all the timelines for athlete participation have expired. The Sports Ministry later cleared Lundup for the Winter Olympics at no cost to the government.
The 27-year-old Lundup is the fifth cross-country skier to represent India at the Winter Olympics. Bahadur Gurung Gupta, who finished 78th in the men’s cross-country sprint skiing event in 2006, was the first. Tashi Lundup was 83rd in the 15km men’s event in 2010, while Nadeem Iqbal and Jagdish Singh came 85th and 99th in the same event in 2014 and 2018, respectively.
India’s campaign at Milano Cortina Winter Olympics 2026 will conclude on Monday with Mohammad Arif Khan competing in the men’s slalom alpine skiing event.
This will be Arif Khan’s second Winter Olympics appearance, having competed in slalom and giant slalom at Beijing 2022. PTI PDS AM PDS AM AM
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