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History
Rock paintings in Norway, dating back to about 3000 BC, depict bow hunters on wood skis. The Greeks, Romans, and Chinese also wrote about the method of hunting on foot in earlier times. Biathlon is a sport dating back millennia. The sport is a tribute to these prehistoric roots, which belong to every human being. Though combining a high-intensity sport like cross-country skiing with a precise and methodical activity like rifle shooting might seem awkward, it truly was a way of life for our species before the rise of civilization.
In Norway, where biathlon is very much a tradition, the story of the birkebeiner is well known. In 1205, a small group of men successfully saved the infant Crown Prince H åkon from certain execution by carrying him fifty-kilometers over mountains on skis with bows on their backs. Though biathlon was not yet an organized sport, the concept continued.
The method of combining skiing with shooting for strategic purposes became prevalent in the militaries of the Northern European nations in the 1500s. Such mountain troops became especially important in the Great Northern War between Sweden and Russia in the early eighteenth century. Such adoption of the technique inevitably led to competition among troops.
The first organized competition of the sport occurred on the Norwegian-Swedish border in 1767. A plethora of races took place up until the modern age. It was included on a demonstration-basis at the first Olympic Winter Games in Chamonix, France. Such demonstrations occurred until 1948, when World War II increased anti-military sentiments around the world and forced its removal.
In 1949, officials proposed opening the races to civilians at a meeting of the International Olympic Committee in Rome. Six years later, biathlon became an official sport of the Olympic Movement and was integrated into the Modern Pentathlon Union in 1957. The first World Championships were held a year later in Austria with twenty-five athletes representing seven nations. Medals in biathlon were contested for the first time in the Olympic Games in 1960, when they were held in Squaw Valley, California.
Spectators today would hardly recognize the format used in the early years of the sport. Biathletes would ski a course of twenty-kilometers, shooting a large bore rifle at four different ranges. These ranges featured several distances and cardboard or glass targets. Two-minute penalties were added to the finish times.
In 1977, the universal weapon for biathlon became a small caliber rifle. Women were first officially allowed to race in 1986, though they did not race in World Championships until 1989 or in the Olympic Games until Albertville 1992.
The sport has progressed rapidly over the past decade fueled by the separation of biathlon from the Modern Pentathlon and Biathlon Union, which occurred in 1993. The International Biathlon Union established its headquarters in Salzburg, Austria, and began an extensive development of the sport. Much of this development came at the highest level of the sport with a vast improvement of the World Cup circuit. Two new race formats were added – the pursuit and the mass start. With a more attractive appearance, the sport has become widely televised and better attended. Viewers and spectators have attracted a large amount of advertising revenue for the sport.
At the 2006 Olympic Games in Torino, Italy, biathletes will compete in five separate competitions for each gender: the sprint, the pursuit, the individual, the relay, and the mass start. This makes biathlon one of the most lucrative medal sports in the Olympic program. Should a nation be interested in having its athletes bring home the most medals from an Olympic Games, it is certain that some of them must be from biathlon.
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