Skiing got its Bud Greenspan moment here at these 2026 Milano-Cortina Winter Games. In men’s slalom, India’s 35-year-old Arif Khan, with back pain and more, finished dead last. In a sport in which races are won by hundredths and sometimes thousandths of a second, Khan finished nearly 48 seconds behind the winner, Switzerland’s Loic Meillard. 

But — Khan finished. 

In conditions that knocked more than half of those who started out of the race, among them Norway’s Atle Lie McGrath, the first-run leader who after missing a gate took off his skis and literally walked into the woods, distraught, Arif Khan finished.