Nordic Olympic musings...

So, this post might not be relevant to people that don't read fasterskier.com as religiously as I do, but anyways, here goes...Within the US biathlon and US nordic ski team organizations, there was a lot of talk coming into these olympics about stuff like "we don't care about anything but the olympics and winning medals." While I've never competed in biathlon or xc skiing at an international level, I still have an opinion on this. This seems like an unrealistic expectation. It's great to work towards winning medals, but it's another thing to consider the Olympics a failure without winning medals, at least in these two sports. The bottom line is that the US has had 4 biathlon world cup podiums in the last 12 months (which were the first podiums in like 20 years), norway and germany have more than 4 world cup podiums in a typical world cup weekend. The US xc team hasn't had a world cup podium this year, and one last year.

In comparison, the US Nordic Combined team broke through with their first medal in the first race in Vancouver. The US NoCo team has 3 world champions on it, along with a slew of world cup podiums and a couple guys who were close to winning world cup overall championships. The consistency of excellent results are a large part of the reason that those guys had 3 in the top 6 and are now the heavy favorite for the team event on Tuesday. All of that international success happened before finally breaking through with a medal.

I am really routing for Tim Burke or Jeremy Teela to win a medal in the mass start biathlon tomorrow, and they both have a chance, but to EXPECT it, is unfair and unwarranted. The same goes for the US xc team. Already, there has been high-water marks in both sports with Teela finishing 9th in the sprint and Kikkan Randall finishing 8th in the womens classic sprint. Yet, if you believe what some folks are saying, it's been an epic failure so far.

Here's a major difference in - it is EVERYTHING in Europe to win at the Olympics in some of these sports. A biathlete in Germany has been named Sportsman/woman of the year several times. If a US biathlete won an an international race, even an Olympic race, they probably wouldn't even be mentioned on sportscenter. In fact, yesterday, with the Olympics in full swing, the joke that is the "worldwide leader in sports" dedicated 24 hours of almost exclusive coverage to a golfer who hasn't golfed in several months, covering a story that the us weekly and the national enquirer should have been covering. Conversely, when Norway didn't finish in the top 25 in the mens 15k skate, every news outlet in the country was writing articles about how wax techs and coaches needed to be fired over that catastrophe. It was a front-page story everywhere and there wasn't a Norweigan in the world that wasn't following that race. That's a significant difference. Another difference is depth. The #2 ranked sprinter in the world is watching these olympics from Norway as he wasn't selected to the team because the sprint event was classic as opposed freestyle. Let's reflect on that - the #2 ranked sprinter in the world did not even make his own national team. On the US team, they had one person in each event with even a remote chance of medalling, and if those folks had bad days or crashed or whatever, it was seen as a bad day for the entire team, even though there has been some great performances by some of these Olympic rookies for the US.

So, why are the national governing bodies of these sports actually expecting medals? It takes time, this isn't like snowboarding, where we invented the sport, the US is playing catch-up. If we're serious about competing internationally in these sports, we need to get more athletes competing at a young age. It can't be a sport for kids that couldn't make their high school basketball team, it needs to be the sport that good athletes want to do. Until then, there won't be a consistent flow of talent and we'll always be dependent on one athlete in each event having the day of their life...

Ok, my rant is over now....