|
Gun World Magazine
Like the javelin, modern pentathlon, and many other Olympic sports, the winter biathlon has its roots in military skills competitions. The sport traces its roots back to the 1760s, when Scandinavian ski troops got together to compete. Finnish ski troops won fame for their light infantry units by defeating the larger, mechanized units of the Soviet Union during the Winter War of 1939 to 1940, largely with "motti" or encircling tactics.
The first winter biathlon world championships were held in 1958 in Austria. Just two years later, it became an Olympic sport at the games in Squaw Valley, California. Early events were shot with center-fire rifles at distances up to 325 yards. In the modern version of the sport, competitors race across snow and ice on cross-country skis, stopping at shooting stations where they must hit 5 targets at 50 meters with a bolt-action .22 rifle. For match-class athletes, targets for prone-position shooting are set at 45 mm in diameter, about 1 3/4 inches, while targets for standing positions are 115 mm, about 4 1/2 inches. Misses require the biathletes to ski penalty loops. Biathletes typically go through the shooting station four times during each race, shooting from the prone position on the first two trips, then from the standing position on the last two.
Racers are challenged by the constant acceleration and deceleration of their breathing and heart rates: way up while they race around the course on their skis, way down when they stop to place rounds on their targets. While skilled marksmen in general are known for their ability to squeeze off shots between breaths, Olympic marksmen are known to be so aware of their bodies that they can pull the trigger between cardiac cycles, that is, the beating of their hearts. That is even more impressive when you consider that biathletes have to lower their heart rate from more than 180 beats per minute, as it is when they are on the race course, down to 140 to 150 beats per minute - within seconds after arriving on the range. Top biathletes are able to cycle through 5 shots in less than 10 seconds.
In the United States, winter biathlon remains a relatively obscure sport. The United States has made great strides in its competitiveness, but American athletes compete against athletes from countries where winter biathlon attracts audiences of several thousand per event.
"In Europe, it is the most popular winter sport on television," explains Brian Olsen, a Minnesota native who qualified for the 2006 Winter Olympics. "At most venues in Europe, 15,000 fans show up hours ahead of time to get a place to stand along the trail or in the shooting range so that they can watch us compete. Some important races have as many as 80,000 spectators. The situation could not be more different in the United States, where it is broadcast during non-Olympic years a week or two after the fact on a cable television station. Our competitions are watch by, at most, a few hundred spectators. It is an uphill battle to get Americans to watch our sport, but once they see and understand it, they get hooked because, in the course of a race, the shooting makes the standings change quickly. Plus, in many places in America, firearms are part of our culture."
The sport attracts both firearms enthusiasts and athletes. Before they got deeply into winter biathlon, Olsen and Jay Bender both say they were skiers, not serious shooters. Olsen had been involved with cross-country skiing for 10 years but, before he was introduced to winter biathlon at the age of 15, he had never even shot a firearm before.
"After that first magazine I fell in love with shooting," says Olsen, a member of the U.S. team. "The mental clarity when you align the sights and squeeze the trigger is hard to duplicate. Adding intense physical activity before the shooting makes that process even more challenging."
Firearms were almost as foreign to Bender, now an officer of the Washington Biathlon Association and a serious enthusiast who is well-known on biathlon discussion boards. A local race changed his lack of interest in firearms.
"All my life I had been one of those anti-gun guys," says Bender. "You know, sailboats instead of power boats, bicycles instead of motorcycles, cross-country skis instead of snowmobiles - one of those. I wasn't rabid and I wasn't really down on the other groups... it just wasn't me. So, when I watched this biathlon race, I was into the skiing, but, as I said to someone, 'I don't know about the gun part.' That said, I will admit that I'd shot a twenty-two as a kid at camp and really enjoyed the challenge of hitting bull's-eyes. But that was one time, a very long time ago. Anyway, as I watched, I noticed that most of the guys racing were shooters first and skiers a distant second. Frankly, most of them were terrible skiers. I figured I could beat most of them even if I had to ski five penalty loops after every shooting bout. The combination of wanting to challenge these guys on skis coupled with my distant memories of the fun of target shooting at camp made me sign up for my first biathlon race."
Of course, you do not have to be an Olympian to enjoy the sport. As Bender said, he fell in love with the sport from his first race. Newcomers can find active clubs in Alaska, Maine, New York, Minnesota, Montana, Colorado, Utah, Oregon, and Washington, places where cross-country skiing is also popular.
"Each of these areas has well-developed cross-country ski racing programs for junior racers, and also has a variety of race series that adults participate in. As these folks watch the Olympics and see skate-ski racing and shooting combined, a few of those club racers get interested in biathlon. Clubs like ours, the Washington Biathlon Association, put on five or six races a season, and we make some noise about them, and invite people we run into to check it out. Most of the biathlon clubs in the country are full of great, fun, helpful folks who are jazzed about a really cool sport."
Some newcomers are shooters who quickly find out that they need to get themselves in shape to be competitive, says Bender. "At the club level, that's okay, as there are plenty of folks competing who are not gifted skiers or runners. The whole atmosphere is more about having fun and improving on your abilities. But, to do well on the national or international scene, one must be a skier first - and fast. The shooting part can be learned, but if you're not already pretty fast on skis, forget being on the World Cup, no matter how good a shot you are."
Need for Speed: Training
Speaking of shooting and training, how do you get to the point where you are competing at high level in biathlon?
"Training for the shooting aspect of biathlon is a rather simple process," says Olsen. "I start out in the beginning of the season just standing or lying for a long time in position. Then I move on to accuracy and precision shooting, always working on the small points, the basics - like squeezing the trigger gently, properly aligning the targets, improving visual contrast. Our targets are black, with white backgrounds, so I will shoot with grey or even just blurry targets to improve my visual contrast. This training helps for all conditions, but especially for when it is snowing, cloudy, or foggy. During this period, there is little regard for how fast I shoot, and there is no physical intensity involved. Then I move on to speeding up the process to faster than how I will shoot in a race. That means using only one breath in between each shot and shooting as fast as 18 seconds from standing still to getting into position to shooting five shots to returning the rifle to my back. Always trying to push the limit while still maintaining the basics and hitting the targets. Then I start combining my physical training with shooting. The intensity increases, and my shooting continues to speed up."
The Carveable Block: Choosing Rifles
Like in any other sport, raw athleticism gets you only part way toward the top. Intense athletic and skills training takes you to another level. The third crucial component is your equipment. Like any sport, most newcomers start out with standard equipment. The main attraction, of course, is that the entry-level rifles are more affordable, but they still allow you to learn the sport and decide whether you want to get more serious. Most beginners in winter biathlon start with a good .22 rifle that they convert for use in the sport. Others start with lower cost model such as the Biathlon 7-3 or Biathlon 7-4 from Izhmash, perhaps better known as the maker of the AK assault rifles. The lighter Biathlon 7-3 was designed with women and juniors in mind.
Biathlon rifles have a Fortner action/toggle bolt, which keeps shooters from having to come out of their stances after each shot. The rifles will have adjustable triggers, snow covers for the barrel and sights, stocks designed to hold extra magazines and harness-like slings so that biathletes can wear the rifles during the skiing portions of the race.
"When I started in biathlon, I did like many people do and looked for the cheapest starter rifle I could find," says Bender. "I bought a used CZ 452 from one of the biathlon competitors who had bought himself a nice new Anschutz 1827 Fortner. I could not, at the time, fathom spending $2,500 to $3,000 on a rifle for a sport I was not altogether sure I would get into. I paid $400 for the CZ, about half of which was for the Anschutz carrying harness mounted on it. The CZ 452 is a nice, light, quite accurate rifle with a post a V-sight set. I was able to shoot fairly tight groups with it, and because of its lightness, did quite well with it standing, shooting 'hunting style' rather than the prescribed bone-to-bone stance you see most biathletes using."
While these starter rifles are not always strictly within the rules, many race directors bend the rules slightly in the less formal races as a way to encourage new people to enter the sport, according to Bender.
"I don't think [the CZ 452] was heavy enough to make the minimum weight standards for biathlon, so I would not have been able to race with it at any of the larger, more official sort of races. Also, there were problems with the sight set. Although they are adjustable with a small screwdriver, they are not easily adjusted on the fly, quickly. During the zero period before a race I would look to see where my group was going. A little low and to the left? I'd aim a little high and to the right during the race. This really didn't work all that well. For one thing, conditions change quite frequently, and you need to be able to assess the wind and light conditions and make sight corrections accordingly - not practical with the CZ. I was soon frustrated and lusted after a better rifle, one with a proper set of adjustable aperture sights. I had gotten enough of a taste to know I was interested, long term, in biathlon so I went for a new Anschutz 1827 Fortner Sprint, complete with harness, hand stop, and an extra butt hook. I made my own sling, since I didn't really like the Anschutz one, and also made myself a stock riser for under the trigger guard (something that was just recently made legal in biathlon - allows the shooter to get the rifle up a little higher where the targets are)."
Bender now says that if he could do things over again, he would have bought the Anschutz "right off the bat."
"My beginning experiences would not have been as frustrating and I wouldn't have spent all the time I did customizing the CZ, not that the $400 for the CZ was wasted. I got every penny back out of it, selling it to another new biathlete coming into the sport. He has since sold it to someone else and bought a used Anschutz. Another new biathlete came on the scene this summer and asked my advice on what rifle to start with. She seemed really jazzed about the sport and seemed also have a few spare dollars. I advised her to go out and buy a brand new Anschutz 1827 Fortner. When she gasped at the price of a new Anschutz, I told her to look at it as an investment."
"My reasoning? It is not going to get any cheaper. I know people who bought 1827s five or six years ago, and now that they've decided to get out of the sport, they are selling their rifles for hundreds more than they paid for them. You'll have a fully-adjustable rifle that can be fit to your body perfectly, is the standard for the sport, and will give you joy and pleasure instead of frustration and excuses. To be fair, one could also buy an Izhmash and have much of the same functionality for much less money, but with a bit of a 'weight tax.' A big guy can do with an Izhmash 7-4 quite well, but a smaller guy or woman would find it heavy."
As competitors get more serious about the sport they tend to gravitate towards the higher-end rifles and then customize their stocks. Past a certain point, your athletic abilities can only take you so far. Ultimately, the athletes find themselves at a point where they no longer want the equipment to be the factor holding them back. Olsen says that he made the move to a more customized rifle before the 2006 U.S. Olympic Trials, when he realized that he needed one to make the next leap toward his goal of winning a medal.
"I looked at every aspect of how I compete and train, what equipment I use, how I eat, and anything else that I could improve. One thing that I realized was that I did not feel absolutely comfortable with my rifle. It was foreign to me. A friend of mine makes musical instruments, likes violins and cellos, and he let me use his wood shop. I picked out the wood and thought up the design. I have very little experience with woodworking, so it took me a number of tries before I started to get anywhere. On one particular day, the rifle stock started to come together. I stayed up all night and all morning - the next day, I had made the rifle. In shooting, I feel much more comfortable with it since I can still remember it as a large, unfinished block of poplar."
No Stick: Ammo Selection
In competitive shooting, one thing that many competitors forget is the importance of ammo selection. "In winter biathlon, ammo becomes even more important because of the impact of the weather," says Bender. Popular brands for biathlon include Lapua (Polar Biathlon) and Eley (which makes both match and club versions of its biathlon ammo). Biathlon ammo is optimized for the sport. For instance, the low shoulder height of Eley's biathlon ammo is supposed to help it better deal with crosswinds, while the minimal lubrication keeps it from making the rifle barrels stickier at the low temperatures common at biathlon venues.
"Ammo is important, particularly at colder temperatures," explains Bender. "Which ammunition to use will require some testing with your rifle. Different brands, and even different rifles of a particular brand, will 'like' one ammunition over another. The only way to find out is by shooting with a number of different ones - best done with a bench rest. When I first got my new rifle I bought several different brands of ammo - from 'cheapy' stuff to really expensive. Of those I shot, the Eley ammo seemed to work the best at normal temperatures. I tried both [Eley] Club Xtra and Tenex, and found that, for my ability as a shooter, Club Xtra performed just fine most of the time, and at half the cost of the Tenex. I am told that the Tenex is very similar, but manufactured to higher tolerances and would , therefore, have fewer 'flyers' per box than the Club Xtra."
In the Turin games, 80 percent of the biathletes and three quarters of the medalists used Lapua ammo, according to the company.
"In really cold temperatures I hear that the only thing to have is [Lapua's] Polar Biathlon," says Bender. "I have a few boxes of it for just that reason. I have found that Tenex does very well in cold weather. These are the kinds of things the seasoned biathlete has taken the time to find out. With testing and diligence, you can easily find out what works in what conditions. Spending a little bit more on the right ammunition, especially for races, is very little to pay when you consider how much money you have poured into the sport, your rifle, travel to the races, lodging, race entry fees, skis, clothing, waxes. Spending $15 on ammo for a race instead of $8 doesn't cost much if you look at the big picture. One thing to know about lubricated ammunition and biathlon is that the lube can get quite sticky at colder temperatures."
Olsen, who now trains as a member of the U.S. Army National Guard, knows all about how much detail goes into a race. "The U.S. Army National Guard sponsors several members of the U.S. biathlon team.) At the age of 16 he went to Norway to take his competitive abilities to the next level. Americans have performed well in the sport, but they have not garnered a lot of international medals yet. Olsen hopes to help change that.
"My decision to go to Norway was synonymous with my deliberate decision to pursue biathlon to the highest level," says Olsen. "I put sport first, ahead of everything else in my life, at age 16. Living and training in Norway made me understand that I am as capable of being a successful biathlete as any Norwegian, or European, and that just because I am an American - no American has ever won an Olympic medal in biathlon - does not make me inferior. It is a barrier that many Americans in European-dominated sports never overcome, but I lived with the best. I saw everything that they did. And I learned to speak their language. So my time in Norway opened my eyes to the possibilities of what I could do in this sport."
 |
