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Chelsea Little

For Biathletes Bédard and Godbout, Spartan Lifestyle is Anything But

As FasterSkier Spartan Race craze almost on a whim, albeit a whim that hinted at the possibility of a payout. A year later, the partners have competed in three more of the notoriously brutal obstacle races, and neither has missed the podium yet. In June in Montreal, Bédard placed second among men and Godbout third among women. A month later in Pennsylvania, Bédard was again second while Godbout won the women’s race, and last weekend...

Photo Gallery: One Training Day in Ruhpolding

The Chiemgau Arena, a shooting range with paved rollerski loops just outside of Ruhpolding, Germany, is a venue unlike almost anything in North America, with the exception perhaps of a few former Olympic sites. And even if Soldier Hollow has nice rollerskiing, too, Ruhpolding has a bit more: other teams, for one, but also spectators who show up even in the summer just to watch some of the world’s top biathletes train. Here are a...

RUHPOLDING, Germany – At the Chiemgau Arena on Monday, the U.S. biathlon team was surrounded by something it doesn’t always experience in training: a cacophony of shots that didn’t belong to them. With the German women’s team, the Ukrainian national team, and juniors from France and Germany on the range, as well as a group of German men doing a non-shooting sprint workout, training was quite a bit busier than your typical biathlon practice in...

For Dalberg and Roberts, National Guard Offers Another Route to Ruhpolding

RUHPOLDING, Germany – When Jake Dalberg made the decision to join the National Guard at age 17, this was exactly what he had in mind. “It was tough, but at the same time I felt like it was what I wanted to do and that was the way to do it,” Dalberg, now 19, said of the decision that the National Guard was his best route forward in biathlon. In just his third year in...

RUHPOLDING, Germany – After winning a World Junior title in 1997, Jay Hakkinen has gone on to compete in four different Olympic Games and notch nine individual World Cup top-tens, including one this year. But despite Hakkinen’s long contribution to the U.S. team, in past years he has been more visible in Europe than in the sport in his home country. In 2008 he moved to Oberhof, Germany, when he and his girlfriend Kristin Orlameunder...

Low-Snow 2012 Proved Perfect Opening for Strafford Nordic, Vermont’s Newest Ski Area

STRAFFORD, Vt. – As Jeremiah Linehan turned his huge Ford truck up the driveway of the Strafford Nordic Center, I looked around, but there was no sign for skiing – just one pointing the way to Rockbottom Farm. Linehan reported that he’d taken the ski center’s sign down for the summer, “just so we don’t have to deal with it.” As his two sons and a 9 year old from down the road chatted in...

Continuing a Summer Tradition, Lanny Barnes Picks Up Two Rollerski Biathlon Titles in Jericho

JERICHO, Vt. – If one thing is constant in summer biathlon races here at the Ethan Allen Firing Range, it’s the sight of Lanny and Tracy Barnes near the top of the results sheets. Since 2009, only one of the sisters, Tracy, has been off the podium – and it was just once. Lanny has won the majority of the races. And the 2012 edition of the North American Rollerski Biathlon Championships was no different....

Photo Gallery: North American Rollerski Biathlon Championships

JERICHO, Vermont – With the entire U.S. senior field and several top Canadians donning bibs this weekend, there was plenty of excitement at the Ethan Allen Firing Range in Jericho, Vermont. In the senior divisions of the North American Rollerski Biathlon Championships, the men’s races were characterized by close finishes, with Tim Burke outsprinting JP Le Guellec for the pursuit title, Ethan Dreissigacker edging Lowell Bailey by one second for fourth, and Sara Studebaker besting...

Burke, Le Guellec Trade Shots, Wins at North American Rollerski Biathlon Championships

JERICHO, Vermont – Just how excited was Jean-Philippe Le Guellec to make the drive from Quebec, Canada,  down to Vermont this weekend for the North American Rollerski Biathlon Championships? “Let me put it this way,” he said. “I was supposed to go on a fishing trip this weekend and I ended up cancelling on my friends because I was so happy that Tim [Burke] and Lowell [Bailey] were here. These guys are in the top...

At its highest level, biathlon is an extremely lucrative sport. After her first full year on the World Cup circuit, now-retired German star Magdalena Neuner reportedly earned 1.3 million Euros by endorsing products – and that was in 2007, before her several overall World Cup titles. By contrast, in 2010, after several seasons of World Cup racing, Petter Northug was worth just over a million dollars in total. But regardless of the top athletes’ success...

HANOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE – When Laura Spector left the East and drove to Bozeman, Montana, this spring, she knew she was headed for school, but she wasn’t sure what was going to happen after that. The 2010 Olympian and national team biathlete had finished up her first full year of training and racing since graduating from Dartmouth College, and it wasn’t what she had been hoping for. After starting the early-season World Cups she struggled,...

Canadian biathlete Brendan Green has had back problems before, but things came to a head in Oslo in February when he herniated a disc warming up for a World Cup race. It was a bittersweet weekend: Green finished 10th in the sprint, 13th in the pursuit, and then 9th in the mass start – the last with the herniated disc – but then faced excruciating pain that necessitated a harrowing trip back to Canada and...

With the 2012 Paralympics starting in London in roughly a month, adaptive athletes who compete in summer sports are putting the finishing touches on their trainings. And winter athletes, too, are hard at work, training just as intensely as their able-bodied counterparts, if a little bit differently. This spring in Bend, Oregon, FasterSkier chatted with Sean Halsted, a veteran member of the U.S. national team who finished seventh, ninth, and tenth in the sit-ski races...

“We have recently hypothesized that the optimal approach to altitude training would be to acclimatize to altitude, but train as close to sea level as possible thereby maximizing running speed and maintaining aerobic fitness,” Drs. Jim Stray-Gundersen and Benjamin Levine wrote in a landmark 1992 paper in the International Journal of Sports Medicine. The pair, who then worked at the University of Texas, were trying to answer the question of whether altitude training was truly...

As Kikkan Randall rounded the last corner in the final of today’s rollerski sprint at the Blink festival in Sandnes, Norway, she was in perfect position to go for the win – and she began revving up for dash to the line. But the American, who won the Sprint Cup on last season’s World Cup circuit, was on pavement, not snow, and she was on matched rollerskis, not her own equipment. All of that added...

A National Team’s Question: How to Get to the Next Camp? Its Answer: Bike!

Like a lot of national teams, the U.S. biathlon squad has training camps at different facilities around the country throughout the year. And after a stint at the Camp Ethan Allen Training Site in Jericho, Vermont, this week, they needed to get home. Unlike most national teams, they solved the logistical challenge by biking there – all the way to the Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid, New York. “It’s funny because it sounds kind...

Note: This is the first of two pieces based on an interview with Biathlon Canada’s High Performance Director, Chris Lindsay, from earlier this spring. Any way you look at it, 2012 was a good year for Canadian biathlon on the World Cup. Jean-Philippe Le Guellec, Brendan Green, and Zina Kocher all notched multiple top-tens. While Green continued an ascent that began with top-20 finishes in 2010 and 2011, for the older two athletes, the results...

Our recent series on biathletes facing the question of when and whether to go to college (parts two, and Development Team alumnus who had risen to the “B” squad but was left off of this year’s national team. Goessling went straight from high school in Minnesota to MWSC, where he has trained for the last two years. In total, he’s made five trips to World Youth and Junior Championships, but the 2012 edition was actually...