US Biathlon's Tim Burke leaves nothing up to chance as he preps for the upcoming race season. The 34-year-old team veteran recently explained he's not averse to double pole training and has been perfecting his shooting from one of the Jedis of American sport shooting.
In Canada's first unofficial on-snow race of the 2016/2017 season -- which most of nearly 100 competitors viewed as a training effort -- American Chelsea Holmes and Canadian national-team biathlete Brendan Green topped their respective fields in the 7.5 and 12 k freestyle races.
World Championships bronze medalist Christian Gow imagines biathlon in a perfect universe like this: "I would make it so that doping didn’t exist and we could all participate on an even playing field."
Megan Tandy, a two-time Olympian who hails from British Columbia but lives in Germany, has been working with Canadian national team coach Roddy Ward - her closest off-season collaboration with the team in eight years. She hopes to regain the form that handed her four top-15s on the World Cup in 2015.
Colorado biathlete Joanne Reid will join Susan Dunklee and Clare Egan to make up the U.S. women's World Cup team for the first period of racing. Meanwhile, Russell Currier (Outdoor Sports Institute) and Paul Schommer (USBA) are short-listed for the men's squad and will join a national team training camp in Canmore, Alberta, before one is ultimately selected.
Carsen Campbell, a stalwart on Canada's youth and junior biathlon squads, has moved into the senior ranks and got his first World Cup start last season. What's the first thing he packs for a European race tour? "My Hammock! Never know when you'll have to sleep in an airport."
2016 was just his second year of biathlon, but Max Durtschi made his World Cup debut in Candmore. Balancing training with the national team and studying neuroscience at Dartmouth College takes a motivation: Durtschi relies on music from the spaghetti western "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly" to get him out of bed in the morning.
After notching a World Cup top 20 last season, Canadian national-team member Julia Ransom is feeling more ready than ever for the upcoming season. On top of racing, she also volunteers with a local youth biathlon program in Canmore and is working toward a management degree.
Amidst a summer of projects on her new house in Vermont, U.S. Biathlon's Susan Dunklee has tried a periodized approach to her shooting training and is looking for big dividends this winter.
To kick off our new "17 Questions for 2017" series, US Biathlon's Maddie Phaneuf tells us about her summer (shooting fast and straight, hiking, and rock climbing) and her ambitions for making her first senior World Championships team this winter.
Eleven Craftsbury Green Racing Project skiers and three coaches took their training to Slovenia and Austria this month to check out Planica's new ski tunnel (in a three-level parking garage) then more snow time 9,000 feet above sea level at the Dachstein glacier.
New research shows that nearly 20 percent of female junior skiers and biathletes in Norway display disordered eating, with the percentage even higher at elite sports high schools.
Martin Johnsrud Sundby blamed his poor performance at 2015 World Championships on stress from his positive doping test, while WADA's scientific director is now commenting that asthma drugs are performance-enhancing at high doses. In addition, Russian hackers released athlete medical records from a WADA database.
Although the IOC said in July that Russia should not host any international winter sports events due to their systematic doping violations and cheating at the 2014 Olympics, it apparently walked those guidelines back -- and now Russia has been awarded biathlon World Championships, despite the fact that the country is not currently in compliance with the WADA Code.
Seven weeks, four countries, one van. For US Biathlon A-team members Leif Nordgren and Sean Doherty, this might sum up their summer, or at least how they spent the last month and a half training. "We wanted to expand our boundaries a little bit," Nordgren said. "Mostly just get out and experience new stimuli and train in other cool places with new people.”
U.S. Biathlon Association President and CEO Max Cobb will join the International Biathlon Union's Executive Board, after serving for four years as the head of the Technical Committee. "As biathlon develops even further, the marriage of the technical aspects of the sport with further development... will become more and more important."
Photos and high-performance observations from last weekend's 2016 US Biathlon Rollerski Nationals at the Ethan Allen Firing Range in Jericho, Vt., held in hot and muggy temperatures. "When you stopped the whole body felt like [it was going] to explode," Bernd Eisenbichler noted.
After coming back from a devastating combination of injuries from a 2015 crash, former U.S. national team member Casey Smith realized that he was treating biathlon like a job, not like fun. He'll re-enroll at Montana State University this fall and say goodbye to elite skiing.
On Tuesday, the IOC Executive Board responded to the McLaren report and listed provisional measures for international sports federations moving forward. Fortunately for FIS and the IBU, they're not on the same timeline as summer sports, and will convene at a meeting in just over two weeks in Rio.
France's Anaïs Bescond has been training with Biathlon Canada for the past two weeks and next two to come. “I think what is really interesting for me is to share our different experience about training,” Bescond said.