Under khan

Winter Youth Olympic Games: The three athletes in focus, Sahil Thakur, Syed Zain, and Faizan Ahmad Lone, have a single mentor and a single dream. What binds them together is not geography.

On a wind-carved ridge above Gulmarg, where the snow gleams with the promise of ambition, these three young Indian alpine skiers are carving more than lines into ice. They are carving a future.

Manali’s towering slopes and Kashmir’s powder fields could not be more distinct, but a shared lineage of belief was shaped under the watchful eye of Mohammad Arif Khan, the trailblazer who became the first Indian to represent the country twice at the Winter Olympics.