Toko Athlete Lukas Bauer Wins in Kuusamo! American Tim Burke 3rd in Ostersund! Toko athlete Tim Burke shot clean and finished 3rd in the Ostersund Biathlon World Cup 10k race I started the skis with a layer of HF blue. Cold powders had been running fast all week so I put Jetstream blue powder on everyone’s qualification skis. In the qualification round, the blue flouro block tested the best and was a safe choice. Since...
Nathan Smith notched another top-30, inching him closer to completing Olympic qualification, but other than that it was a tough day for the North American men. "I would have thought that with two penalties I would have been in the top 15 for sure," said Tim Burke, who finished 21st.
The U.S. men went for it today, and the team was in podium position for much of the first half of Saturday's 4 x 7.5 k relay competition. They ended up 11th with Lowell Bailey, Tim Burke, Jeremy Teela, and Leif Nordgren, just 25 seconds out of sixth.
Despite a mid-race snowstorm that put later starters at a serious disadvantage, Lowell Bailey finished 16th and Tim Burke 24th in the 10 k sprint in Hochfilzen. They were the only two Americans, men or women, to qualify for the pursuit races on Sunday. "We can't control the weather," shooting coach Armin Auchentaller said.
The official beginning to the 2014 racing season didn't disappoint with tons of exciting nordic action taking place across the globe. FasterSkier was on-site in West Yellowstone to cover the SuperTour opener, Kikkan Randall opened with her best classic-sprint finish of second in Kuusamo, Noah Hoffman notched the fastest men's time in Sunday's 15 k pursuit to end the Kuusamo Ruka Triple, and Tim Burke had his first podium of the biathlon season.
Martin Fourcade (France) wins the men's World Cup Biathlon 10 k sprint after 2nd place Fredrik Lindstroem (Sweden) crashes. American Tim Burke finishes in third.
Four years ago, Tim Burke faced a lot of pressure to become the first American to win an Olympic medal in biathlon. He's in the same situation now, but he says he much better prepared to handle it going into the 2014 World Cup season. We talked to Burke and Susan Dunklee, the top-ranked woman on the U.S. team, about expectations.
This might be Andrea Henkel’s swan-song season, but the 35-year-old German biathlete and multiple Olympic gold medalist showed she’s in the hunt for one of her best winters yet – sweeping the opening biathlon races last weekend in Sjusjøen, Norway. We spoke with Henkel last month when she was in Lake Placid, N.Y.
USBA picked 11 athletes to send to Europe this fall, based on trials races this summer in Jericho and last week at Soldier Hollow. Some of them will be picked for Sochi - but who? We clarify the qualification process, as well as getting some comments from High Performance Director Bernd Eisenbichler about the performances he saw in Utah last week.
FasterSkier caught the US Biathlon team during one of their hardest workouts of the training season in Lake Placid, with the added bonus of watching German gold medalist Andrea Henkel rollerski around with them.
Liz Stephen and Tim Burke make skiing uphill for five miles look like a piece of cake. That's because there was nobody within about three minutes of either of them in their Climb to the Castle wins on Sunday.
Images from the men's 12.5-kilometer pursuit at the Ethan Allen Firing Range on Aug. 11, the last of the two-day North American Biathlon Rollerski Championships in Jericho, Vt. (Women's 10 k pursuit photos to come.)
Lowell Bailey could go around telling people he won two national rollerski titles this weekend. But that’s not exactly the biggest deal for Bailey, a U.S. biathlon champion multiple times over who’s been competing at the sport’s highest level for more than a decade.
With a bevvy of international podiums by North American men and a group of four U.S. and Canadian women who ended the season ranked in the 40's, it was tough to pick our biathletes of the year. But Americans Tim Burke and Annelies Cook stood out to snag top honors.
With the Olympics looming, the U.S. Biathlon Association cut its national team to the smallest it has been in years, with no new members and only one athlete under the age of 25; development was cut almost completely. President and CEO Max Cobb hopes that good performances in Sochi will be a rising tide that lifts all boats in his sport.
After blunders in Saturday's pursuit, Martin Fourcade of France was back to his winning ways in the mass start, and has become the first man since Raphael Poiree to sweep all of the crystal globes. American Tim Burke was in the pack fighting for second, but despite pushing Emil Hegle Svendsen to his absolute limit had to settle for fourth by just 0.3 seconds.
Coming off the high of a top-five in Sochi, Russia, last weekend, U.S. Biathlon’s Tim Burke continued the momentum on Friday in Khanty-Mansiysk with a ninth-place finish in the 10 k sprint, the third-to-last race of the World Cup season. Lowell Bailey also had a strong finish in 11th place, two seconds behind Burke with perfect shooting.
In fourth place just seconds from the front after two legs of Sunday's 4 x 7.5 k relay, the U.S. men went on to place tenth after losing out on a photo finish with Slovakia. They appreciated the chance to preview the Olympic courses, but with dangerous crashes and complaints about the difficulty of the trails, they expect to see a different Sochi when they come back in a year's time for the Games.
"It's beautiful and it's very strange," U.S. biathlete Annelies Cook said of the new Olympic venue in Sochi, which sits just next to the cross country trails on the slopes of a steep mountain chain. From racing to the athlete village, from unusual rules about rifles to pleasant surprises with washing machines, biathletes are learning what life will be like at next year's Games.
While Martin Fourcade of France joked that now he has his gold medal from Sochi, Tim Burke finished the day with important insight, too: namely, that he can ski among the fastest times on the trails that will hold Olympic competition next winter. With only one missed shot in the 20 k race, the American made the top five for the second competition in a row.