Shiva Keshavan will head into the first heat of the men’s singles luge at his sixth and final Winter Olympics campaign on Saturday after completing six training runs at the Alpensia Sliding Centre in the last three days.
Keshavan’s best lap time came in the first of six training runs, when he recorded 49.186 seconds. He finished 15th out of 20 participants and his timing was 1.391 seconds slower than the leader.
The Alpensia Sliding Centre in Pyeongchang is a very technical track, Keshavan had told The Field. “There are a couple of pretty tricky corners and combinations where there is potential for mistakes.”
The track was completed only a year ago, with the first test runs taking place last February, so there are still conflicting views within the luge community as to how best to manoeuvre certain curves and corners. “There is still room for error because people are still tentative about certain curves,” Keshavan had said.
Here is how Keshavan fared in the trial runs, although this is no indication of how he will fare in the heats:
Training Run 1:
Position: 15/20
Lap time: 49.186 seconds
Time behind leader: 1.391 seconds
Training Run 2:
Position: 16/20
Lap time: 50.022 seconds
Time behind leader: 2.074 seconds
Training Run 3:
Position: 18/20
Lap time: 50.281 seconds
Time behind leader: 2.502 seconds
Training Run 4:
Position: 16/20
Lap time: 49.574 seconds
Time behind leader: 1.698 seconds
Training Run 5:
Position: 35/40
Lap time: 49.218 seconds
Time behind leader: 1.421 seconds
Training Run 6:
Position: 35/40
Lap time: 49.500 seconds
Time behind leader: 1.546 seconds