VandeHei’s new Zen incarnation fits right in with the rest of Finish Line, a daily Axios newsletter that promises “tips & tricks for thinking smarter about life,” and works as a sort of Goop for aspiring CEOs, with nuggets of health, social-science and psychology, accompanied by frequent aspirational bits of feel-good wisdom. One contribution from Allen featured Palantir’s CEO explaining why you should run like a snail. Another, from VandeHei and Erica Pandey, promoted hand-strengthening exercises as a key to longevity.
“The idea behind Finish Line was, You’re watching Netflix with your significant other,” says Allen, whose byline also tops newsier newsletters. “You pick up your phone. You can doom scroll, and read something that makes you feel bad. Or you can actually use Finish Line to give you something healthy, helpful, hopeful.”
Perhaps that’s how civilians are meant to engage with it.
But I knew about the run-like-a-snail and the exercise-your-hands columns, not to mention the peace and love vibe, because I’m a journalist in Washington and there seems to be a whole culture built around fellow Beltway insiders emailing and Slacking and IMing one another excerpts from Finish Line, often accompanied by some version of “WTF.” Who are these guys, champions of “flood the zone” coverage, to be sermonizing about choosing joy or avoiding doomscrolling? Axios wouldn’t hire a career coach or fitness expert for political coverage — could it be that they’re elaborately pranking us by doing the reverse?
The common denominator of most of the folks who gawk at the leadership columns is that — unlike me — they interacted at some point as journalistic colleagues or competitors of VandeHei, whose former public image was as a leader who favored martial analogies and the chest-thumping style of a football coach’s locker room pep talk. As a cofounder of POLITICO, he willed a game-changing publication into being before leaving amid, to put it mildly, acrimony over his leadership and headlines about financial losses and a polarized culture. He started Axios soon after. Both publications have since sold. A few of my colleagues lived through all of this, but I only showed up six years afterwards. My sole experience with VandeHei was in a previous job as editor of a magazine that covered the fireworks of his departure.
Still, the spectacle of any Washington type suddenly not living up to a prior public image is always interesting. Was the old image incomplete? Or did something change to turn Mr. Admirer-of-People-Who-Break-Things into Mr. Admirer-of-Uncommon-Humility? Or is there some other dynamic going on, one that says something about the larger ecosystem of the capital?
“I’m no less hard-charging now,” VandeHei told me. “I still get up at 4:30 in the morning. I still work around the clock. I’m still, I think, demanding of myself and demanding of others. But I would like to think I’ve evolved as a leader about how I take that ambition and energy and harness it in a way that brings out the best.”
That’s more or less what you’ll get out of the columns, too — many of which deploy a familiar foil in order to illustrate the moral of the story: Jim VandeHei. The Jim VandeHei of a few years ago, that is.
In New Jim’s telling, Old Jim was perpetually screwing things up with his temper and impulsivity and ego. Old Jim’s booboos represent object lessons for New Jim’s wisdom, anchoring columns about the importance of being kind when firing people, embracing “soft power” to avoid running a sweatshop, or not descending into unwinnable conflicts.
It’s a charming literary device. To be sure, the screw-ups humble New Jim is pinning on callow Old Jim are generally misdemeanor offenses, the kind of stuff that’s relatively easy to cop to if you’re a man who sold his start-up for a mint — mostly small-ball tactical blunders, not big-picture blowups like the ones that punctuated the split from this publication.
Aside from one man’s reckoning (or not) with his own track record, the leadership columns actually reflect something bigger, both about society at this moment, and about how people boss in 2023. The Beltway culture that incubated most of today’s top journalists — and top political staffers, and top policy makers — was one that valued paying your dues, sucking up subpar wages and subpar treatment in order to establish yourself in a hyper-competitive game. Successful organizations were also high-burnout ones.
For reasons ranging from generational tastes to Covid-era labor-force challenges, it’s a model that is teetering.
“I think younger workers demanded something much different of us than we demanded of our employer when we got into the game, right?,” VandeHei says. “Like, let’s be honest, when we got a job, coming out of college, we wanted to get a paycheck. And we didn’t want someone to hit us, right? We never thought about culture.” Today’s journalism newbies, he thinks, are apt to say, “I want more. I want purpose. I want to make sure that you as a company care about things that are important to me, diversity and inclusion.”
Of course, he’s hardly the only one who has made that discovery. Management thinking everywhere in the knowledge industry has evolved — it’s just that most of the George Pattons suddenly finding their inner Dalai Lamas don’t seem quite so eager to share it with the world. VandeHei, with his self-promoting instinct (and a column to fill), opts to shout the new values from the rooftops, a Nixon-to-China reinvention that the political scribe might once have enjoyed covering. As such, he’s turned himself into perhaps the Beltway’s highest-profile example of a very 2023 model of leadership: The assertive empath.
VandeHei says people have ribbed him about the wise-man columns, so he’s not completely unself-aware. But in person he comes off as a true believer — and no one in-house suggested to me that there’s a secret dungeonmaster lurking beneath the public good-guy performance. It’s part of his style: In every one of his incarnations he has always been a zealous missionary for whatever leaderly religion he was espousing.
All the same, the other truth of modern media is that, just as the worker bees have changed, so have some of the stars. Arianna Huffington went from CEO to brand-name promoter of better sleep habits. Plenty of high-profile media figures have associated themselves with causes or values or styles without leaving their positions, too.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Smokey Robinson’s first collection of new songs in 14 years is gorgeous, tender and utterly filthy – a concept album about sex called Gasms. Robinson, 83, admits he thought the title would be good for business. “When people think of gasms, they think of orgasms first and foremost … I tell everybody: ‘Whatever your gasm is, that’s exactly what I’m talking about.’” He bursts out laughing. Within seconds of meeting him, you can tell this is a man who’s done a hell of a lot of laughing, loving and living.
On the title track, Robinson sings about eyegasms, eargasms, the whole gamut of gasms. If there is any danger of missing the point, he throws in double entendres that verge on the single. He sings with the silky falsetto of yesteryear, the words perfectly phrased as ever. The album ranges from the exultant (“We’re each other’s ecstasy”) on Roll Around to the biological (“If you got an inner vacancy / Baby, then make it a place for me”) on I Fit in There.
It’s important for him to show that older people are still sexual beings, he says. “When I hear of grandfathers and grandmothers who are 60 years old being talked about as if you’re counting them out and putting them out to pasture, I think it’s ridiculous. This is a new era of life. I feel 50.” He has no intention of turning into an old man, whatever his age.
Smokey Robinson (front) and the Miracles, circa 1963. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Has his attitude towards sex changed since he was a teenager? “I still feel the same way, only I’m wiser with it. When you’re young and you have those exploratory feelings about sex, you haven’t lived long enough to know the value of it. So yes, I have a different attitude to it, but I still feel sexual. And I hope I’ll always feel like that. OK, chronologically, I’m 83, but it’s not really my age.”
We are chatting on a video call. Robinson lives in Los Angeles with his second wife, Frances Glandney, a successful interior designer. But today he is in New York publicising Gasms. His hair is jet black, his eyes golden-green, his skin taut, his teeth Alpine white. The look might not be 100% natural, but it works. Even if he allowed his hair to grey, his teeth to yellow and his skin to sag, Robinson would be youthful – possibly more so. The voice, the energy, the enthusiasm and the smarts all make him young.
It’s impossible to overstate Robinson’s influence on soul music. He was part of the team at the launch of Motown (then Tamla Records) in 1959, with his great friend Berry Gordy, the founder of the Detroit label. Motown’s first No 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, Mary Wells’s My Guy, in 1964, was written and produced by Robinson. He has written numerous hits for other artists – The Way You Do (the Things You Do), Since I Lost My Baby, Get Ready and My Girl for the Temptations, Ain’t That Peculiar for Marvin Gaye, Don’t Mess With Bill for the Marvelettes, to name a few. Then there are the classics with his group the Miracles, including The Tears of a Clown (written with Stevie Wonder and Hank Cosby), The Tracks of My Tears (written with Warren Moore and Marvin Tarplin), I Second That Emotion (written with Al Cleveland). And the solo hits, such as Cruisin’ and Being With You. He is said to have written more than 4,000 songs. Oh yes, and he was vice-president of Motown.
Smokey and his second wife, Frances Glandney, at Elton John Aids Foundation’s academy awards party in March 2023. Photograph: Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Elton John Aids Foundation
Nobody wrote about love and desire like Robinson. You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me has one of music’s greatest first lines (“I don’t like you, but I love you”), while the lyrics to The Tears of a Clown (“Now if I appear to be carefree / It’s only to camouflage my sadness / And honey to shield my pride I try / To cover this hurt with a show of gladness”) show why Bob Dylan called him “America’s greatest living poet”.
William Robinson Jr was born in Detroit to working-class parents who had little money but plenty of love. His two sisters were born to the same mother, but different fathers. Although his parents divorced when he was three, they remained united as parents. “My mom used to say: ‘You’re going to have to take care of him after I’m gone, so you love him.’ I don’t know how she knew that. And my dad would say: ‘You gotta love your mom because she’s a great woman.’ Even though they couldn’t stay in the same room for five minutes together, they still promoted each other to me.”
By the age of four, his Uncle Claude had nicknamed him Smokey Joe. “If you asked me what my name was, I’d say Smokey Joe because I’m a cowboy. Even my teachers called me it.” Smokey Joe stuck till the Joe became surplus. When he was 10, his mother died. His older sister, Geraldine, and her husband, who had 10 children, moved into the family home and looked after him as if he was No 11, while his father lived upstairs. He was a bright, conscientious boy who planned to study dentistry until he discovered you had to dissect animals. That didn’t appeal, so he changed to electrical engineering.
His real dream was to become a singer. But, back then, he believed people from his background didn’t do that kind of thing.
‘I’m not as close to any man on earth as I am to Berry’: Smokey Robinson with Motown records founder Berry Gordy in LA, 1981. Photograph: Joan Adlen Photography/Getty Images
A couple of blocks away lived Aretha Franklin and her brother Cecil, another of his closest friends. When Robinson was 10, Diana Ross moved into his street with her family. He says his childhood was wonderful. “It’s beautiful to know we were kids playing together. And these people are some of the most famous people in the world now. We had such joy. I grew up in the hood, baby. And I mean the hood.”Franklin had a more privileged background. “Right in the middle of the ghetto there were two plush blocks, Boston Boulevard and Arden Park,that had lawns and big homes. Aretha lived on Boston Boulevard ’cos her father had money – he was one of the biggest preachers in the country. But it wasn’t like they were the rich kids. No, we just all played together. We stayed lifelong friends.”
They had singing competitions on the Franklins’ back porch, which Aretha and her sister Erma invariably won: “Erma was a helluva singer, too.” Most of his friends from then have died, too many when they were young – through drugs or violence. “When Aretha passed, in 2018, she was my longest friend I had who was still alive. I’d known Aretha since I was eight.”
One day, young Robinson went with his band, the Miracles, to see the managers of his hero, Jackie Wilson. They told him the band didn’t have a chance because he sang high, as did the Miracles’ female singer (Claudette Rogers, Robinson’s girlfriend, who went on to be his first wife and the mother of two of his three children), so their sound was too similar to that of the Platters, the world’s most popular band at the time, who also had a female singer and a male singer who sang high. But Berry Gordy happened to be there and he liked what he heard. He started to mentor Robinson and the Miracles, and they recorded a single, Got a Job.
Robinson started college. One day in class, he was listening to his radio when their single came on. “I went apeshit. I jumped up and ran out of class, and that was it for me. I said to Dad: ‘I want to quit college and try music,’ and he surprised me. He said: ‘You’re only 17 years old – you’ve got time to fail. If it doesn’t work out, you can go back to school.’”
Less than two years later, Motown was formed. “Berry sat us down and said: ‘I’m going to start my own record company. I’ve borrowed $800 from my family. We’re not going to just make black music – we’re going to make music for the world. We’re going to have great beats and great stories.’ As far as I’m concerned, there had never been anything like Motown before that time, and there will never, ever be anything like Motown again.” He’s got a point.
By the age of 19, he and Claudette were married. They remained so for 27 years, although he had affairs along the way. Were he and Franklin an item at one point? “No, just friends.” He smiles. “I do admit when I was about 15 I had a crush on her.” Who wouldn’t, I say. “Hehehe! Yeah, she was fine!” Did he and Ross have a thing? He pauses. “Yes, we did.” How long for? “About a year. I was married at the time. We were working together and it just happened. But it was beautiful. She’s a beautiful lady, and I love her right till today. She’s one of my closest people. She was young and trying to get her career together. I was trying to help her. I brought her to Motown, in fact. I wasn’t going after her and she wasn’t going after me. It just happened.”
Smokey with Mary Wilson, Diana Ross and Florence Ballard of the Supremes, 1965. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
What happened to them? “After we’d been seeing each other for a while, Diana said to me she couldn’t do that because she knew Claudette, and she knew I still loved my wife. And I did. I loved my wife very much.”
He looks at me and says this is what he was talking about earlier – understanding love. “You asked me what happened when we get older, and we get wisdom in life. I learned that we are capable of loving more than one person at the same time. And it has been made taboo by us. By people. It’s not because one person isn’t worthy or they don’t live up to what you expect – it has to do with feelings. If we could control love, nobody would love anybody. Nobody would take that chance. Why would you put your heart out there for somebody to be able to hurt you like that and make you able to have those feelings?”
I ask if he has heard the rumour about him and Ross. There is a story, I say, that you two are the real parents of Michael Jackson. “They say I’m the baby daddy?” His voice rises an octave.“Hehehehe! Hooohooho! They say Diana Ross and I had Michael?” Yes. “Oh my God! I never heard that one, man! That’s pretty good. That’s funny! That’s funny!”
I wonder if she has heard it. “I’m gonna call her and ask her.” He is still laughing. “That’s funny!”
Robinson has examined the complexities of love beautifully in his songs. But his understanding is by no means confined to sexual love. He talks about his love for his father; the brother-in-law who became his second dad; Aretha’s brother Cecil, who died at 50; Sam Cooke, who was 33; and Marvin Gaye, who was killed in 1984 by his father, aged 44. “I do miss them. I wonder what they would have been like were they alive today. Especially Marvin, man. Marvin and I were brothers, man. We hung out almost every day of our lives. To lose him at that age was a real blow … The last thing I ever expected to see him was dead.” And such a violent death? “Yes, exactly. He’d got into trouble with drugs when he died.”
Robinson also succumbed to addiction. Was he in trouble when Gaye was? “It was during and afterwards. My most dramatic bout with it was afterwards. During, we did it together. I just never got strung out. I was never a cocaine person then. I got involved with that after he died. And it took me out. It was the worst time of my life – a life experience I will never forget, but I will never do again.”
Had he been as close to Gaye as to Gordy? “No, I’m not as close to any man on Earth as I am to Berry. Berry is still my best friend. It was another kind of relationship. It was different because Berry’s never done drugs. Marvin and I had a different relationship – we were promiscuous, the same age. With Berry, you didn’t take any drugs around him. We all respected him. He was our leader, our boss. He just happened to be my best friend, too.
“Berry calls it a bromance,” he says. “We have a love for each other, man; we’re there for each other. When I was going through my heaviest part with the drugs, for two years I was damn near dead. It wiped me out. But Berry, man, during that time he’d bring me up to his house and lock me up there for a week or two. He’d just keep me there so I couldn’t keep doing what I was doing to myself. He looked after me.”
Robinson tells me that one night he walked into a church, met the minister and told her everything. He went in an addict and came out free from drugs. It was a miracle, he says. “That was May 1986 and I’ve never touched drugs since.”
One of his greatest Motown memories is Martin Luther King’s visit. “You know what he said to us? He said: ‘I want to do my “I have a dream” speech on Motown because you guys are doing with music what I’m trying to do politically – bring people together. You have united the races and the world with music.’”
In their earliest days, Robinson says, Motown’s acts played to segregated audiences – black kids on one side, white kids on the other. “We went back a year later and they were all dancing together. White boys had black girlfriends, black boys had white girlfriends, and it was all because of the music. We gave them a common love. So I’m really, really, really, really, really proud of that. About a year after we started Motown, we started getting letters from white kids in those areas: ‘Hey, man, we got your music, we luuurv your music, but our parents don’t know we have it because if they knew we had it they might make us throw it away.’ A year or so later, we got letters from the parents. ‘Hey, we found out our kids were listening to your music. We were curious, so we started listening to it. We luuurv your music. We’re glad the kids have it.’” He tells the story with such vim, but he looks emotional. “I’m so proud we started to break down barriers.”
Does he ever look back and wish he had become a dentist? He laughs. “No! I also had aspirations of playing baseball. I think about that all the time. I think I could have been the greatest player in the history of baseball and my career would have been over 50 years ago. If I’d been the greatest dentist in the world I’d have been retired for 20 years by now! But I was blessed enough to be in music, which gives you longevity if you love it, if you respect it.”
It’s all about keeping perspective, he says. “You’ve got to understand you didn’t start it and you ain’t gonna finish it and you don’t go getting a big head ’cos you’ve got a record out or people recognise you: ‘Oh, boy, I’m hot shit.’ ’Cos you’re not: you’re just a person who’s blessed enough to have your dream of being in showbusiness come true. I tell young people all the time: ‘Don’t go getting hoity-toity ’cos you’ve got a hit record, because this started way, way, way before your great-grandmother was born and it’s going to go on way, way, way after you. So you better know that!’”
Was there any danger of him getting hoity-toity? “No, I had a better upbringing than that. I was always taught that I’m human and that’s the best you can be. You don’t get no bigger than that on our planet.”
I ask a final question. What is his favourite gasm? “I guess if you’re gonna start at the world, you’d have to say God is my favourite gasm, but other than that, love is my favourite gasm. I wish love on the world.” And with that, the global minister for love leaves me brimming with the stuff.
Gasms is releasedon 28 April. For more information, go to smokeyrobinson.com
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
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Immense joy for the Juventus goalkeeper Matthias Perin and for his wife Giorgia Miatto. Their already beautiful family has in fact expanded further. Vittoria and Leonardo, the couple’s first two children, welcomed little Virginia into their home. The announcement, as often happens in these cases, arrived on Instagram.
Credit: grgina – Instagram
These are very happy days for several well-known personalities of the Italian sport. Just recently, in fact, the champion of blue basketball and of the Boston Celtics in the NBA, Daniel Gallinari and his partner Eleonora Boi have announced the imminent birth of their second baby.
In December 2023, the basketball player and the journalist model had already become parents with the birth of the little girl Anastasia and now I am eagerly expecting another child.
A few days earlier, precisely on January 20, life decided to give a beautiful gift to Mattia Perin too, Juventus goalkeeper.
The 30-year-old from Latina, married since 2019 to his historic partner Giorgia Miattohas in fact become a father for his third time.
The two already had two beautiful children who often appear in their posts on social media and whose name was Victory And Leonardo. The newcomer, however, is called Virginia.
Mattia Perin’s announcement
Credit: grgina – Instagram
As often happens when a well-known entertainment or sports figure becomes a father or mother, the announcement of the birth of the baby is given up Instagram.
Credit: grgina – Instagram
The Juventus goalkeeper, who has been gaining more and more support lately and is slowly gaining a owner’s shirthas published several photo of her baby just born, to then accompany them with these sweet words:
2023-02-20 11:25 PM, Welcome to our crazy little Virginia family. Vitto and Leo can’t wait to cuddle you 🫶🏼 thank you @grgina you were wonderful ❤️ I thought I was used to it by now but I was wrong. Feeling live the energy that releases a new life produces emotions that are impossible to get used to!
Very many current or former teammateswho wanted to comment on Mattia’s post for to congratulate with him and his Giorgia for this beautiful event. Among the many appear those of Angel Di Maria, Dusan Vlahovic, Ciro Immobile, Miralem Pjanic, Nicolò Fagioli, Antonio Candreva and Adrien Rabiot.
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( With inputs from : pledgetimes.com )
Srinagar, Feb 25: On February 25, 2021, India and Pakistan army top brass renewed the ceasefire pact in a bid to ensure peace along the Line of Control (LoC). Two years on, the agreement between the two sides is being strictly adhered to paving way for the LoC residents to reap the peace dividends and to live a normal life after so many decades.
The ceasefire violations that otherwise had claimed many lives, left many handicapped, and damaged property worth crores, have come to almost zero since past two years as guns from the both sides have fallen silent.
It is the two years of reaffirmation of the ceasefire agreement between India and Pakistan. “The ceasefire agreement has changed the lives. Hope this lasts…,” Muhammad Ashraf, a Sarpanch in Uri area of northern district of Baramulla, told news agency—Kashmir News Observer (KNO). “We are happy, so are our families, especially children. Farming activities, schooling, marriages, sports activities are going on peacefully and normally without any fear.”
Ashraf said that people in Uri visit their agriculture fields close to LoC without fear. “Two years have been peaceful years of our lives. The feeling is different and we are delighted and contended,” he said.
Sabir Khan, a resident of Garkote village, close to LoC in Uri, said that he and his family has borne the brunt of ceasefire violations. “I lost my wife and two children to the shelling. My brother lost his leg. There are many like us,” he said. “Hope this silence on LoC continues so that our children can see a peaceful life ahead.”
Youth in Uri are wearing a gentle smile. “It’s really good. We have participated in so many sports activities in past two years. Before that, our parents never allowed us to play in open,” said Zaid Rashid, class 8, student. “We can even go for trekking. This has now become our passion.”
On February 25, 2021, in a surprising development, when tensions were running high on both sides, the DGsMO of India and Pakistan issued a joint statement that read: “In the interest of achieving mutually beneficial and sustainable peace along the borders, the two DGsMO agreed to address each other’s core issues and concerns which have the propensity to disturb the peace and lead to violence. Both sides agreed for strict observance of all agreements, understandings and cease firing along the Line of Control and all other sectors with effect from midnight February 24-25 Feb 2021.”
This was the first time since the 2003 ceasefire agreement that both countries agreed to adhere to the ceasefire. The decision came after the revocation of Article 370 on August 5, 2019. The speculations of many analysts suggested that the ceasefire won’t last long, but prevailing peace along the LoC has proved them wrong.
Residents of Karnah, Teetwal and Kupwara echoed similar story of peace, calm and happiness. “Shelling and exchange of fire damaged our houses, crops and took away our loved ones too,” said Atiqa, a resident of Karnah, adding that “We have tasted peace for the first time in past two years. We can venture out anytime without fear. Our children study and roam around freely. Guns have fallen silent since past two years, we hope this will remain so.” She said earlier, their demand was construction of underground bunkers but now the residents of border villages demand better roads, upgradation of health care infrastructure and better educational set up including colleges, and schools.
Defence officials said that both sides are strictly adhering to the ceasefire pact. “In 2021, there were zero violations and in year 2022 figure is almost same,” said an official—(KNO)
Gulmarg, Feb 12 (GNS): Sunny weather blessed at Gulmarg on Sunday giving respite to players and organisers as all the events scheduled for the day were conducted smoothly at all the venues. All the players, coaches, officials donning their jerseys with enthusiastic spirit reached venues early to earn time for final practice before matches.
One of the Alpine G slalom players while expressing his happiness said that it is a great opportunity to participate in 3rd Edition of Khelo India. He said that today the weather is very pleasant and he hopes to give his best to make his state proud.
The sports events fixed for 3rd day of Winter Games included Ice Stock, Ice Hockey, Ice Skating, Bandy Curling, Bobsleighing & Skelton, Snow Shoe, Nordic, Ski Mountaineering, Alpine G Slalom and Cross Country.
During the events, a huge number of spectators clapped and shouted to extend support to their favourite teams. Meanwhile winners were awarded prizes by the officers & officials of J&K Sports councils after registering top position by defeating opponent teams & players.
Earlier, In bandy Gujarat registered first position, Haryana second position while Maharashtra satisfied with third position.Similarly, in Ice Skating of 1000 Mtr. for the senior Girls category, Swarali Ashutosh Deo of Maharashtra achieved 1st position, Raina Kukreja got 2nd position and Anushka Merchant obtained 3rd position, both the players belonged to Haryana.
In the same event of senior Men, Suyog Sanjay Tapkir of Maharashtra wrested 1st position, Anubhav Gupta from UP and Padma Gurmeet of Ladakh got 2nd and 3rd position respectively.
In another Figure Skaters event of Boys 13-15 Years, Kapish Kaushik and Utkarsh Saxena both players from Haryana got first and second positions respectively while Ayush Jaguri, Uttrakhand had to satisfy at 3rd position. While in Figure Skaters Girls-15-19 Years, Wafa Tariq from J&K topped, followed by Chelsi Singh of Haryana at 2nd position and Shezan Wani, J&K at 3rd position.
Also, in Figure Skaters age category Senior Girls, Kashish Sharma stayed at top and Suyog Sanjay Tapkir obtained top position in Speed Skaters in Senior Men Category.
Aman Thakur (HAWS) got gold medal in Senior Men Long Distance competition, Ghulam Haider (Ladakh)got gold in Junior Boys Long Distance competition, Dhanalaksmi ( Karnataka) received gold in Senior Women Long Distance category and Sara (J&K) took gold medal Junior Girls Long Distance.
In Nordic 15 KMS (Men) Shubham Parihar ( Army Red) got 1st position and in Nordic 1.5 KM Jr. Girls Shabnum (HP) scaled top position. Farhat Shabir (J&K) & Priyanshu Kawan (UK) achieved first position in Alpine Catogory 01 Boys and Alpine Catogory 02 Boys respectively.
During the entire day, officers of J&K Sports council continued to monitor events by visiting venues and interacting with the players. Secretary J&K Sports council while speaking at Kongdoori said all the events are going as per schedule at all the venues. She said that players were very happy and ready to show their capabilities.
She informed that Union Minister for Youth Affairs and Sports Anurag Thakur instructed the department to organise sports events at other destinations including Sonmarg, Pahalgam Doodpathri in future and other possible venues to promote the winter sports at these places. (GNS)
