CBC's Karin Larsen in Korea: Biathlon Night in Canada, anyone?
In a race that combines skiing fast and shooting straight, there’s nothing so uncertain as a sure thing
In an alternate reality of my making, biathlon would rule the TV sports world.
Honestly, what's not to love about a guts-out ski race that has periodic time-outs for rifle shooting?
The TV production of the sport is totally radical: from the extreme close-ups of bullets hitting targets with matching shots of racer reaction, to the great graphics that give it a video game-like quality.
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But even more to the point, biathlon is a sport where the drama is always dialed up to 11. Just when someone is poised to win the race, everything goes topsy turvy.
Take the the men's 20-kilometre individual race from last night. Frenchman Martin Fourcade — the Wayne Gretzky of biathlon — was dominating, en route to a second straight gold medal.
He was skiing fast. He was shooting like a star. He had picked off the first 15 of 20 targets as if they were the size of hula hoop, not a toonie.
At the three-quarter pole, Fourcade had built himself a big cushion. All he needed was to hit four of the last five targets, cruise to the finish line, and, voila, Olympic champion once again.
But, as Scotty Bowman once said, there's nothing so uncertain as a sure thing.
With gold in his grasp, Fourcade proceeded to miss his first target in the final shooting round. Bad, but not disastrous, because even with a one-minute penalty for the miss, he still had the lead.
Then he missed the next shot. In the millisecond it took for that bullet to go wide right, it was game over, hello fifth place.
Fourcade's split second of frailty illustrates the great paradox that is at the heart of biathlon. The better a racer shoots, the more the pressure mounts. But the more the pressure mounts the harder it is to shoot well.
To mix sport metaphors, squeezing the trigger is tough when you're squeezing the stick.
It's what makes biathlon so darn compelling. It's also what makes it worthy of a bigger audience.
Biathlon Night in Canada anyone?
