Norway already had a winning women's relay team, but the addition of Ann-Kristin Flatland, a former World Cup winner who took last season off to have a baby, only made them more dominant. The Norwegians collected a 54-second victory over Russia, even though their rivals used only a single spare round to clean their 40 targets. The U.S. was 13th and Canada 14th.
A strong team effort, where each racer skied among the fastest times of the day withstood the pressure of the notoriously loud and crazy Oberhof fans, gave the U.S. their best relay result in the era of modern biathlon.
Sean Doherty (Vermont Collegiate Biathlon) and Anna Kubek (Mount Itasca) dominated their fields so thoroughly that it was tough for anyone else to come close enough tot qualify automatically, thanks to USBA's percent-back system. But with a little discretion, ten young biathletes are bound for Obertilliach, Austria, later this month.
After rain and snow, and sprint, pursuit, and mass start competitions, four biathletes got the nod to join the IBU Cup roster for trips to Otepaa, Estonia, and Ostrov, Russia. Hannah Dreissigacker, Katrina Howe, Bill Bowler, and Wynn Roberts will make the trip, but Corrine Malcolm missed the cut despite winning the sprint.
Lake Placid-based biathletes are excited about the extension of their rollerski loop at the Olympic Jumping Complex, which cost $500,000 and took about 14 weeks to complete this fall.
For the third time this year, the U.S. Ski Team ran into their counterparts on the biathlon squad earlier this week when both groups were in Utah for their respective training camps. “The biathletes were at Soldier Hollow yesterday as was the entire U.S. Ski Team,” skier Noah Hoffman wrote in an e-mail to FasterSkier on Tuesday. “Cross country was doing a speed (10-15 seconds) session classic. I’m not sure what was involved in the...
LAKE PLACID, N.Y. — As seven US Biathlon Team members repeated loops around the stadium during trail-running intervals at Mt. Van Hoevenberg on Friday, each had their own things going on, their own focus. A-Team athlete Susan Dunklee, a Craftsbury Green Racing Project skier who tied the best U.S. women’s result of fifth at Biathlon World Championships last year, warmed up and cooled down on her mountain bike to remedy tendonitis in her knee. But for the...
LAKE PLACID, N.Y. — While the U.S. Nordic Ski Team trained on the mountainous,
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...
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...
Our recent series on biathletes facing the question of when and whether to go to college (parts two, and expressed frustration that star athlete Laura Spector was returning to school for the summer after a disappointing season and did not seem to plan on joining the national team program in Lake Placid. It was not an unreasonable sentiment: without actually seeing an athlete, a coach’s job is certainly much harder. And as a European (Kahkonen...
Note: This is the second piece in a three-part series following several groups of biathletes as they negotiate the college question.
This season, U.S. biathlete Laura Spector was tired, possibly overtrained, and unable to find the form that had netted her a top-20 World Cup finish in 2011. She's solving the problem in an unconventional way: by taking organic chemistry.
As the 2014 Sochi Olympics draw near, the U.S. Biathlon Association is focusing all of its resources on the national team. President Max Cobb discussed subtle changes in strategy: a smaller men's team, a bigger women's team, and lots of careful planning.
For the World Cup athletes, Thursday’s announcement by the U.S. Biathlon Association of team nominations for the second period of racing brought no surprises. Just as in the last weekend of World Cup racing in December, three women (Sara Studebaker, Annelies Cook, and Susan Dunklee) and four men (Lowell Bailey, Jay Hakkinen, Tim Burke, and Leif Nordgren) will represent the U.S. on the trails. But the real excitement of the day came from the selection...
The U.S. biathlon community may be small, but one benefit of its size is that almost everyone can gather each year in October for a training camp at Soldier Hollow. This year, the senior national team is joined in Utah by the junior national team as well as biathletes from the Maine Winter Sports Center, Durango and as far as Canada. Inviting everyone brings training quality up, said national team women’s coach Jonne Kahkonen, who...
Last year, the U.S. Biathlon Association (USBA) took eight men to Europe for a summer training camp, leaving the women’s team to train by themselves in Lake Placid. Since then, a dedicated women’s coach (Jonne Kahkonen) has been hired, so the women are in some ways more than ever their own team. But this summer three of them were invited to the camp in Germany and are training alongside the men. “For us, it’s definitely...
Last week, the National Cross Country Ski Education Foundation (NCCSEF) announced on its website that it is now calling itself the National Nordic Foundation (NNF). But changes at the foundation are more than just in name only. Nordic Combined now falls under their auspices, and over the next few weeks NNF will be testing out a new marketing and fundraising strategy. The non-profit foundation was set up as NCCSEF in 1997 to help elite developing...
(Note: this interview is the third in a series of profiles of USBA coaches. The first two were with Jonne Kahkonen.) When Patrick Coffey was hired by the United States Biathlon Association (USBA) as an assistant coach in 2008, he had only three years of coaching experience, making him an unusual choice for a national team position. But what he lacked in formal training and experience, he made up for in passion. In those three...