April 9, 2005 – For those of you who were looking forward to this issue of The Shot arriving in your inboxes in early February, I apologize. In late January, I qualified for the World Cup Team for Torino and Pokljuka. From other athletes, I had heard that it was usually possible to connect a laptop to the high-speed networks at the World Cup venues. For some reason, this season it was impossible to find an economical solution to connecting my computer to the Internet. So again, sorry for the tardiness.

This issue is a bit different from the previous interviews and race play-by-plays that I have written over the season. (This style will return later this spring.) Because I was at the big show, experiencing the races first hand as an athlete, I feel that this perspective might be more interesting than a simple regurgitation of what happened and who won how ever many times. Being pressed to keep this within the limits of your attention span, I might gloss over a few races and details. If you are interested in the results, then visit biathlonworld.com, where you will find full results and race recaps.

With the Antholz World Cup complete in late January, all of the teams began focusing on the next World Cup event. Though every World Cup is important, the event three weeks away was in San Sicario, the venue that will play host to biathlon competitions for the 2006 Winter Olympic Games next February. So it is an understatement to say that they “began” focusing because many of the teams were placing these “Pre-Olympics” on a level as important as World Championships. Teams wanted to experiment with the altitude and dry conditions while also finding the best accommodations possible for the big event.

The U.S. Team moved from Antholz to Ridnaun, a steep valley in the Italian Alps a few hours west. I flew in a few days after the team arrived. Ridnaun is an amazing place to be a biathlete in the middle of the season. For the most part, the competition season is a blur of moving from hotel to hotel, duffel bags in corners serving as closets, and training clothes strewn on the deck playing odor control. There are always beds that are too soft, too hard, too short, too thin, or a funny yellow and green color with a weird smell. For the U.S. Team, traveling the circuit is test in coping skills. The main exception, where those coping skills get a rest, is in Ridnaun.

It is with good reason that the Hotel Schneeberg in Ridnaun is called Vacation Paradise. Large rooms with comfortable beds and fancy decorations. Five course dinners that take two hours from start to finish, on average. Thirty kilometers of ski trails out the door, with the shooting range only a five minute ski away. Oh, and then there is the wellness area with a dozen different saunas, aroma rooms, pools, and hot tubs. For an athlete that has been traveling for half a season, imagine the impact this four-star hotel has on him!

After two weeks in Ridnaun, feeling refreshed, the team traveled to the World Cup in San Sicario, a mountain village an hour west of Torino near the border with France. The idea was that Ridnaun, elevation 4500 feet, would be good preparation for San Sicario, elevation 5500 feet. Though they are similar in altitude, the dryness in San Sicario makes it much more difficult to acclimatize. The only snow around was the man-made snow on the competition trails. It is also really warm; I used sun-block after a few days to ward off becoming a prune.

Despite the problems of acclimatizing, both the venue and I were ready for our first World Cup. Fate entered into the situation for me, and those coping skills I wrote about earlier were put to the test. The night that we arrived, I was pulling out the couch to see if it would be better than a mattress on the floor. Having traveled all day, I was tired and my shoes were off. I dropped the couch right on my foot. Though the pain was severe in the first few minutes, somehow it magically subsided. That is until an hour into sleeping when I woke up in agony, with fierce pain shooting up my leg. I could not sleep at all and was worried about the swelling and weird colors that my big toe was going through. But being an athlete, overcoming challenges is my job.

Each day, the toe healed more and the pain began to subside, though I was still fighting off the mock hangover I had from not sleeping that entire night. We had two training days before the World Cup, so I was running out of time to heal. If the first day was any indication of whether I would be able to compete, then the answer was a resounding no. The (few) flat sections were okay because I could balance the weight on my heels or arch, but pushing off in V1 was excruciating. The course definitely did not help. It is one of the most difficult courses on the circuit, not because the hills are steep or long, but because there are precious few meters where it is possible to recover. The downhills are like slalom courses due to the turns and the slick man-made snow. Add in the altitude and dryness and we have ourselves a perfect course for the Olympics!

With the help of the German team doctor, I was able to reduce the inflammation and pain to a level that I could tolerate while skiing. It would be my first opportunity to race a World Cup, to see where I was at compared to the best in the world, so I decided to start.

The World Cup is surprisingly relaxing. Since many of the athletes have been on the circuit for many seasons, there is a certain sense of calmness compared to World Junior Championships, for example. Though I was certainly nervous and anxious to start, I was relatively relaxed about the whole thing. A good deal of this was because the venue was in such a beautiful area with the sun shining every day and the fact that it was not packed with 50,000 spectators, like World Cup venues are in Germany and Russia.

Considering my injury, the race went pretty well. Biathlon is such a great sport because there are the dual demands of shooting and skiing. So because my skiing was suffering, I still had the capacity to focus on performing well on the range, which I did. 75 percent shooting in my first World Cup race is something with which I can be satisfied. It is difficult to finish in the triple digits, but transitioning from junior to senior, I know that focusing on performance rather than results is the best method to improving and getting to the single digits.

The U.S. team had a rough day. Jay Hakkinen was our top finisher in sixty-first place. With each race, performances improved though. In the women’s race, our top result came from Rachel Steer, who finished twenty-first. Hakkinen placed fourteenth in the sprint a few days later.

The real winners in San Sicario were the Russians. In every race, they were the major force. In the individual race in which I competed, the men place three in the top four. In the women’s race the next day, the Russian duo of Bogali and Pyleva finished one-two, with two more of their teammates in the top-ten. In the sprint races, it was nearly the same story, as was it with the relays. Many of the Russians that did well trained in the remote country of Armenia, where they have obviously found a very successful training location. More applicable though is the focus that the Russian team put on the Pre-Olympics; many of them sacrificed earlier and later performances in order to do well.

After the last race in San Sicario, the team drove to northern Slovenia for the next event, following a one night stop in Torino. In the latter days of the World Cup in San Sicario, our team learned that we had lost our fifth start spot for men; in fact, we had never had it and the fact that I was allowed to start in the individual race was a mistake by the organizing committee. There was both a miscommunication and misinterpretation of the rules on our part. So being that fifth start spot, I was left to watch the circuit from the side, though very much in the center.

In Pokljuka, Slovenia, our team was accommodated in a hotel together with the French and Norwegians. One thing that became obvious to me, from watching the faces of the different athletes, and how they lived and ate, was that the most successful athletes were also the most focused. When they were at an event, their job was biathlon. This goes only to a point because even the most focused need a break. So it is not surprising that they go to a party or bar every now and then. It taught me that finding the right personal balance between focus and relaxing is key to becoming successful.

With eight top-thirty finishes from four different athletes, the U.S. team had perhaps its most successful World Cup in history in Pokljuka. The most defining event of the week came in the men’s mass start. Ole Einar Bjørndalen returned from World Ski Championships, where he finished eleventh in the 15-km freestyle race, to claim the victory with perfect shooting. Raphael Poirée of France, sensing the challenge, returned to form and placed second with one miss. Ricco Gross matched Bjørndalen’s shooting, but finished eighth. In the women’s race earlier that day, Olga Pyleva was second with one miss, having skied on the prototype Rossignol S2 skis.

Next issue released April 14

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