the biathlon competition promises to be heckled by the blizzard – Liberation

The snow and especially the wind blowing over the Zhangjiakou biathlon stadium are worrying the teams of the favorites. In particular the French who will try to retain their title in the mixed relay on Saturday.

How to reach your target when gusts sweep across the launch pad and the cold numbs your fingers? Answering this question will already afford a piece of medal for biathletes from Saturday at the Beijing Olympics. Because, as if the temperature oscillating from -20 to -10 degrees in the best of cases were not enough, the Zhangjiakou biathlon stadium (180 km west of the capital) is very exposed to the wind.

«These are pretty rock’n’roll conditions,” summarizes the shooting coach of the French women’s team, Jean-Paul Giachino. The rotation of the neighboring wind turbines, the swaying of the tall grass and the penetrating cold are not deceiving: the wind is blowing. “Even on the prone shot, the wind makes the gun move, describes Giachino. That means it blows really hard.” «It will be a bit more of a lottery,” adds the Norwegian women’s shooting coach, Patrick Oberegger.

“It was complicated but manageable”

“You just have to take a look”, Frenchwoman Julia Simon reassured herself on Wednesday the day after her first series of shots thwarted by the gusts. “I had a little trouble understanding the wind, it takes time to observe how it impacts: laterally or vertically. It’s good, I started to understand.

Wednesday, at the time of training, the gusts reached 11 m / s. They are announced in the weather forecast at 15 m/s on Saturday on the schedule for the mixed relay, the first biathlon event of these Games. “It was complicated but manageable, if there are more it will be difficult”, estimated by videoconference Anaïs Chevalier-Bouchet who will form with Julia Simon the female half of the French quartet which is trying on Saturday to win, as in 2018, the mixed relay.

Some biathletes have even trained specifically in windy conditions, including current World Cup leader Quentin Fillon-Maillet. “We focused the preparation on that last summer, he detailed before the Games. We put a snow cannon in the middle of the launch pad to simulate the wind. By adjusting the power of the ventilation and the distance of the barrel, he was able to try “different levels of difficulty”. With so many random conditions, it remains to be hoped, he says, that the biathlon events do not run at “lottery draw for an Olympic medal”.

Protect fingers and face

“We can’t train with the wind and the cold from here., sweeps the Norwegian coach Patrick Oberegger. We can have wind, cold but not the combination of the two like here. The temperatures felt degraded by the wind forced his biathlete Marte Olsbu Roeiseland, leader of the general classification of the World Cup, to come and ask for self-adhesive strips to protect his face in the middle of a session.

The penetrating cold forces you to arbitrate between the maneuverability of the gloves and the sensitivity of the fingers. “It’s everyone’s choice but I find it difficult to have very thick gloves to shoot”, says Anaïs Chevalier-Boucher who made a prototype “by doing a bit of sewing: I added a retractable layer over a piece of mitten that I can take off before shooting and put it back on when I go skiing again”.