Cross Country Skier Magazine
Early Norwegian skiers lacked groomed and marked trails. Like cross country skiers today, their journeys went uphill. They schussed down boulder zones rivaling mogul course. They dodged spruce and birch trees like champion slalom skiers. Sometimes, there was no way to get over a stream--except to jump it. Toting a rifle or bow along to hunt game, these early biathletes found skiing a necessity, not a sport.
Biathlon’s Roots
Modern skiing, from downhill and jumping to biathlon and cross country, stems from the utilitarian need for skiing in Norwegian daily life. With miles of snow-filled forested mountains, skiing was often the only way to travel between the sparsely populated fjords and valleys. In the early eighteenth century, the Norwegian military adopted skiing tactics for its first company of skiing troops--responsible for patrolling the Swedish border where they saw increased hostility. As tensions eased, military troops from the northern regions began competing amongst one another in biathlon and skiing.
In 1767, Norway sponsored the first recorded biathlon race among military troops on the Swedish border. Not only did athletes come together for the first time to compete against one another in biathlon, but the event was also the first race ever held on skis. Within a century, skiing became a sport for amusement, recreation and competition. In 1861, Norway’s first ski club--the Trysil Shooters and Skiers Club—pursued both shooting and skiing.
Eventually, skiing separated from its traditional connection with shooting. With the invention of the modern binding around 1850, more amateur skiers took to skiing for pleasure. While civilians enjoyed skiing in increasing numbers, biathlon remained mostly a military affair. Even in early Olympic Games, where biathlon was a medal event, participating athletes were primarily soldiers.
In the decades that followed, skiing itself split into the many different disciplines seen today, following a technological revolution that brought groomed trails, tow ropes and specialized equipment. Meanwhile, two horrible world wars were fought stigmatizing the skiing community against anything related to the military. Biathlon was something better left forgotten, along with tanks and bombs.
In the United States, the military drove the development of skiing. During World War II, the U.S. Army conscripted some of America’s top skiers into the Tenth Mountain Division. Inspired by Finnish ski soldiers’ success in demolishing the Soviet Union’s mechanized units invading Karelia in 1939-40, the army created this special skiing division. After the war, the troops that made it home alive became some of the most important pioneers in American skiing over the next several decades, although most of their energies went towards furthering downhill and cross country skiing, rather than biathlon.
After World War II, some adamant Swedes saved biathlon, returning it to its place in the realm of international sport. Their work resulted in the first World Championships in 1958 and the return of biathlon to the Olympic Games two year later in Squaw Valley, California. During this revival, the International Modern Pentathlon and Biathlon Union (U.I.P.M.B.) governed biathlon while skiing disciplines formed under the International Ski Federation (F.I.S.). Perhaps the stigma from war kept biathlon and pentathlon, sports which both had military histories, separate from the civilian realm.
In the late seventies, federal regulations in the United States--the Amateur Sports Act--declared that the organizations governing sports could only control one sport, which resulted in the U.S. Modern Pentathlon and Biathlon Association splitting in two. Some discussion proposed folding biathlon into the U.S. Ski Association, but the notion that biathlon was a whole different sport from the disciplines of skiing ended debate. Thus, the U.S. Biathlon Association was founded in 1978.
A similar process occurred at the international level in the late eighties that resulted in the separation of biathlon from U.I.P.M.B. With seemingly never a mention of merging biathlon with F.I.S., the International Biathlon Union was founded in 1992.
Spectators Drive Competitions
Today, biathlon and cross country skiing continue to evolve with the ever-changing tastes of spectators and television viewers. Since biathlon separated from pentathlon, its popularity skyrocketed; it is now the most popular winter sport on European television. World Cup events in Germany, Italy and Norway can draw up to a 100,000 spectators.
The shooting aspect of biathlon adds an intriguing and exciting element of chance to the sport that appeals to a wider audience than cross country skiing alone. Competitions are rarely won in biathlon until after the final shooting stage. Thus, the shooting range is the focal point of a biathlon race for the crowd. When an athlete is shooting, a roar of thousands of voices will magically rise and fall with the hits and misses. The sound is deafening at its height, and eerily silent at its depth. And magically, it is timed perfectly to the targets.
This focal point is something that is lacking and difficult to create in a long cross country ski race. To increase the amount of time that the audience sees the racers, cross country ski races have become progressively shorter and now utilize shorter loops. Governing Nordic skiing, the F.I.S. noticed the booming popularity of biathlon, bringing on the rise of sprint racing and the new dual-technique pursuit. These two events underscore the F.I.S. mission to appeal to both the spectator and television audience.
Events and Training
Biathlon ski training is similar to strategies used by cross country skiers. However, the nuances of biathlon inherently require some adjustment of tactics.
Biathlon race distances have a much smaller range than those seen in skiing. Men race distances between 7.5 km and 15 km, while women race between 6 km and 12.5 km, excluding the individual race, which is being phased out because its length does not suit television schedules. This distance means that biathletes train for races lasting around 30 to 45 minutes whereas cross country skiers train for races lasting from two minutes to as much as three hours.
While ski racing is an uninterrupted stretch of intense work, essentially biathlon strings together a set of hard skating intervals divided by bouts of shooting. Shooting stages certainly are not complete rest, but they do provide the opportunity to recover to some degree. Because of the shooting stages, the pace of a biathlon race is often faster than a cross country race of the same distance, excluding the deceleration prior to entering the shooting range.
Of course, the most obvious peculiarity presented by biathlon requires biathletes to carry an eight-pound, .22 caliber rifle around the entire course. Seemingly a hefty burden, most biathletes just require a small adjustment of their technique to compensate for the rifle.
Since all international races are freestyle, the classic technique is rarely used in competition.
“Physically, the two sports have similar requirements,” says Jon Arne Enevoldsen, who has been an elite-level coach of both biathletes and cross country skiers and now coaches at the Green Mountain Valley School in Waitsfield, Vermont. “But because biathlon is all skating, a biathlete must be able to skate well. This means that most intensity sessions should be done skating, while a cross country skier will roughly split intensity between classic and skating.”
It would be wrong to suggest that biathletes never classic ski. In fact, Enevoldsen suggests that biathletes do 30-40 percent of their ski training on classic skis. Rachel Steer, who has been the top U.S. biathlete for the past few seasons, concentrated on classic skiing this past summer. She says that it has made her a better biathlete. “Good classic technique makes for improved skate technique,” says Steer, who trains in Anchorage with cross country ski coach Jan Buron. “Although I may not look so pretty on classic skis, I think it has been worth my time to focus on classic.”
Because of the dual demands of being both a good shooter and fast skier, biathlon training requires a large amount of time and preparation. Biathletes bring the two together in “combination training,” or combos. Essentially, combos are intervals of training for skiing divided by bouts of shooting, much like the format of an actual biathlon race. They are practiced at either low or high intensity, but because the shooting divides the intervals, biathletes learn to adapt their heart rate and snap their concentration from skiing to shooting.
This type of training requires not only the additional time needed to set up the targets, adjust the rifle to the wind and light conditions of the day and load ammunition, but it also demands a venue that has a shooting range. With only a dozen world class biathlon venues in the United States, it is not surprising that biathletes come from and train in the same areas.
All-Around Skiing
While biathlon and the other forms of skiing continue to fragment into new disciplines, it is clear that if the basic idea of skiing is to grow, cooperation between disciplines is crucial. At the 2002 Olympic Games, the German Ski Team, which is one of only a few ski associations that includes biathlon and all disciplines of skiing in one organization, showed how cooperation can net results. Wax technicians from downhill skiing gave advice to their cross country colleagues, who were already trading skis with the Nordic combined and biathlon teams. The result was one of Germany’s most successful Olympic Games ever.
The Nordic skiing disciplines--biathlon, combined, cross country and jumping--represented nearly 25 percent of the medals won by Germany and Norway in the last Olympic Games. The United States won none. If the U.S. is to dominate the Winter Games like it has the Summer Games, then more of its successes must come from the Nordic forms of skiing.
Introducing kids at an early age to all disciplines of skiing, rather than dividing them, is one way to develop stronger Nordic competitors. In the past, many states had skimeister competitions, in which the winner was the best all-around skier in cross country, downhill and jumping. The Maine Winter Sports Center, a non-profit group promoting skiing in Maine, has followed this approach of keeping all skiers together. At practices, kids take a few shots with an air rifle on the shooting range, play ski games in the stadium and jump off hand-made jumps under the instruction of coaches. In fact, a requirement for passing one of the organization’s ski tests is the ability to land a jump without falling.
If skiing is to be instilled as a culture and life-long activity in communities, then the all-around approach is essential—much like the early Norwegian biathletes. Although we may never return to the days of skiing as a necessity, it can be a healthy activity within our grasp.
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