Another World Cup Biathlon finished in Presque Isle Saturday, Feb. 20th, tapping into Aroostook County’s ski heritage and bringing in visitors from around the world.
Biathletes from the Czech Republic, France and Norway dominated the skiing and sharpshooting competition at the Nordic Heritage Center, as about 4,500 spectators watched during the three-day event.
“We are amazingly lucky with this one, for sure,” said Jane Towle, a Presque Isle real estate agent who helped organize the event. Before the event, snow had to be made, due to the mild winter. Then the women’s relay race was moved to Saturday as a harsh cold front moved into the area, with wind chills approaching 30 below.
“But it came out beautifully,” Towle said. “This World Cup that we hold every few years is a fundraiser that keeps it going,” she said of Nordic Heritage Center, the four-season recreational trails and lodge where the event was held.
Czech skier Gabriela Soukalova took first place in both the sprint and pursuit races, and led her country’s relay team, while U.S. skier Susan Dunklee came in second place during the sprint Thursday in her best-ever result. Among the men, Norway’s Johannes Thingnes Boe won first in the sprint, France’s Martin Fourcade won the pursuit and the Norwegian team won the relay.
With biathletes from around 30 countries competing every season, the World Cup Biathlon series draws an estimated 60 million live television viewers from Europe and another 60 million from around the world, according to Towle.
Biathlon evolved into a popular, televised international sport in the early 1990s, said Christian Manzoni, a native of Switzerland who works for the International Biathlon Union as a photo editor and a guide for other journalists and photographers.
In 1992, biathlon was opened to women as an Olympic sport, and biathletes from a newly reunified Germany started winning a lot of competitions. “The German television stations became interested in the sport and it was spread out over Europe,” said Manzoni, who grew up playing hockey and cross-country and alpine skiing.
At the same time, Europe became more interconnected, Russia started shedding its Soviet past and 12 formerly Soviet-controlled countries began participating in biathlon, including Ukraine, Belarus and Poland. “They were not anymore the bad guys as they were in the Cold War,” Manzoni said.
By the early 2000s, the “sport itself developed with new disciplines and races, and so the interest grew,” Manzoni said. Combined with advances in videography, the sport has made great television (and live, online streaming) that pairs well with the northern, winter cultures of Europe, Scandinavia and Russia, Manzoni said.
“You need to be a good skier to be a good biathlete and you also need to be a good shooter, but the aesthetic part of the sport is the skiing on the track,” Manzoni said.
More than half of the spectators at the competition were students from northern Maine who came on Thursday and Friday, but there were also ski fans and families of the athletes from around Maine, the country and the world.
New York City college students Olga Kuznetsova and Oleg Deziubenko drove to Presque Isle from New York City to see the event. Kuznetsova cheered for the team of her native Ukraine, and Deziubenko for the team from his native Russia.
“I love the beauty of the sport,” Kuznetsova said Saturday morning at the Quoggy Jo Ski Center. Both of them cross country ski and wanted to try a little downhill skiing before the afternoon races. The Ukrainian teams this season “have been doing pretty well,” she said, hours before the Ukrainian women’s relay team came in second place.
Deziubenko, who was relishing carving down the modest slope, said the trip to Maine for the biathlon reminded him a little of his homeland, with its forests, lakes, rivers and mountains: “Good weather, good nature and good people.”
