As Lowell Bailey rounded the course on Saturday in Nove Mesto, Czech Republic, a total of five times in the men’s 12.5-kilometer pursuit, he couldn’t hear a thing his coaches were shouting at him. The 35,000 spectators in the stadium and lining the track were overpowering them, but their movements gave the US Biathlon veteran all the information he needed to know. “It was, by far, the loudest spectator crowd I’ve ever experienced,” Bailey recalled on...
(Note: This article has been updated to include comments from Canada’s Julia Ransom.) Beaming with excitement, France’s Anaïs Chevalier could barely believe her good fortune of this race weekend in Nove Mesto, Czech Republic, immediately following the first International Biathlon Union (IBU) World Cup podium of her career in according to an IBU press release. “I was scared,” she recounted of trying to hold off Wierer on her last loop. “I was only enjoying the last...
On Friday morning, Susan Dunklee woke up with a cold. A mild one, but enough to dull the nervous system and wreak havoc on her shooting, she feared. But she had a race ahead of her, the first of hopefully three this weekend, and the US Biathlon veteran forged ahead with her race-day routine in Nove Mesto, Czech Republic. “Once I started warming up, I felt mentally awake and ready,” Dunklee recalled in an email to...
(Note: This article has been updated to include comments from Canada’s Scott Gow.) The exact details of Martin Fourcade’s record book depend a bit on who you ask. The official statistics of the International Biathlon Union (IBU) say the French biathlete got his 50th IBU World Cup victory on Friday in the men’s 10-kilometer sprint in Pokljuka, Slovenia. By his own count, he claims he already hit that milestone last week and this was his 52nd...
The U.S. men’s biathlon team was already starting the World Cup season with a man down: Sean Doherty, the several-time World Youth and Junior Champion and 2014 Olympian, who had come down with mononucleosis. But the team is now down to just three men after fellow 2014 Olympian Leif Nordgren had to have surgery on his toe after an incident with a treadmill. Until January at least, that leaves just Lowell Bailey, Tim Burke and...
A quick trajectory. That's a succinct way of describing US Biathlon's Clare Egan ascent onto the World Cup. She first picked up a rifle three years ago, and today you might just see her shoot clean.
Welcome to The Rundown, your quick primer of need-to-know information about the day’s racing. We’ll be updating this digest as the day goes on with additional results, photos and quotes. The Rundown is NOT a race report; stay tuned for complete race reports later today with interviews from the day’s top racers. (Note: This Rundown has been updated to include comments from U.S. Nordic Combined’s Bryan Fletcher, who placed ninth on Sunday at the World...
Starting with just under a minute separating him from first place, Lowell Bailey made sure he didn’t get too caught up on what could be. A veteran member of US Biathlon’s national team, Bailey started the men’s 12.5-kilometer pursuit on Sunday in 13th, exactly 59 seconds behind the first man out of the gate, Martin Fourcade of France. Fourcade had according to a press release. “We were going very close. Before going to Östersund, I...
Lowell Bailey is the two-year anniversary earlier this fall. Both are US Biathlon team veterans, and at 35 and 34 years old, respectively, they’re still lighting up the International Biathlon Union (IBU) World Cup. The teammates and training partners, based out of Lake Placid, N.Y., finished one place and 2.1 seconds apart on Thursday, with Bailey ending up 15th and Burke 16th in the first men’s individual World Cup race of the season: the 20-kilometer individual in Östersund,...
Wind and picked up the sport a little over a year ago, it’s even more impressive that she recorded her first World Cup top 30 in the longest-format (four-stage) biathlon race on one of the windiest race days in recent memory. “This was definitely my best result, probably more due to luck than anything else,” Reid wrote in an email on Wednesday night. Of 99 finishers, only one woman hit all 20 targets: third-place finisher Darya Yurkevich of Belarus....
The most important thing to pack on a racing trip is your positive attitude, says the U.S. Biathlon Development Team's Paul Schommer. "And when the season concludes, I always look forward to heading back to the Ski Haus for the Bjorn Bakken Ski Championships of America, the greatest backyard ski race on the planet."
After making the US Biathlon national team three years in a row, but missing out on qualifying for the 2015/2016 season, Russell Currier is back and ready to race the World Cup. “It was a huge relief,” Currier said of his renomination this November.
Most of us can imagine stumbling across a finish line, lungs burning. It’s a whole other realm of precision like suffering to pound out the kilometers while intermittently trying to hit a small target. In this episode of Nordic Nation, 28-year-old Clare Egan describes what it’s like coming to the sport as a novice shooter with Olympic aspirations.
Biathlon Canada's World Cup team selection races wrapped up last Thursday, with two sprints at Frozen Thunder. Along with Canada's Rosanna Crawford, Julia Ransom, Megan Tandy, and Scott Gow, Americans Lowell Bailey, Tim Burke, Joanne Reid, and Susan Dunklee reached the podium by the end of trials.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”