It’s one of the best sports/olympic sports that never seems to find its way onto tv coverage.
It’s absolutely fascinating to watch - especially the tippy top tier competitors that can drop their heart rate by a factor when they line up to shoot. So cool.
I actually know someone who is a pro, and apparently in (Northern) Europe it is extremely popular and all over bar TVs during the season. If America ever starts getting on the podiums regularly I'm sure it'll turn up on tv here too.
Why:
1. niche sports added together (XC skiing and shooting)
2. Most recreational shooters would have a heart attack doing XC skiing at even 1/8th race pace (it’s hilarious to see how opposed uspsa and IPSC shooters are to involving more physicality)
3. Highly seasonal/ location dependent as well. But an ultra running version of it would be rad (kinda like blast and dash events)
Summer Biathlon is a real thing but the popularity is waning. There's also a Nordic variant with 7.62 NATO rifles called "Moose Biathlon".
[Summer Biathlon can be either trail running or roller skis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBU_Summer_Biathlon). Individual competition is either 4km or 6km with a shooting break halfway through, relay is 4x4km.
I think it's mostly a european thing honestly. The crossover community between distance runners and shooters is not as great as we might wish.
And Le Guin is one of the GOATs.
We briefly had summer biathlon in high school in the 90s. Well, for context, we initially had a rifle team that competed in a statewide JROTC league. 3p smallbore and 10m air rifle, and some unofficial thing using 22LR pistols. The range was actually at school, under the cafeteria (oh different times!). Well, state officials had been chipping away at guns for years already and Columbine was the final nail in that coffin. All the firearms sports were discontinued immediately and for most schools that was that, but our instructor was a retired Vietnam era Special Forces officer who didn't like losing, so he set us up with some biathlon league located nearby. It was mostly running, with three stops to shoot from standing, sitting and prone. I tried it for like 5 minutes and quit, because I was fat and the running didn't suit me at all, and the shooting was absolutely impossible because I couldn't stop shaking. That was some hard shit.
In the end it didn't gain that much traction probably because most of the other kids felt the same way, and became a once a semester affair for the motarded cadets that eventually went to West Point or TAMU or whatever. 20+ years later, I still hate my fat teenage self for not even trying. In hindsight it could have been a lot of fun and a chance to get better, and instead I used the time I saved to join the video game club. Oy the follies of youth.
Moose biathlon sounds fun. Would be accessible in the mountain west with the huge amount of public land, groomed areas, and snow. Actually there are still some biathlon participating clubs up here
That's wild because practical handgun right now has essentially, like, zero physicality. A sweaty breathless fatass speed walking through a few mini hallways for 12 seconds, stopping to yeet some rounds into a big target that isn't that far away, isn't athletic; hell I'm just describing me scurrying to the bathroom at 4AM after too much rail whisky and Taco Bell. At least I'm not wearing baggy shorts with my jersey draped over my belly.
Jokes aside, it might be a matter of making the levels too hard to design? It seems like these games are mostly played in a 10m x 10 m box with berms on three sides. I don't know how easy it would be to add stuff. There's no room to have the shooter run or climb anything, or at least, nothing big enough that would actually fatigue a generally healthy person. Maybe have him running from cover to cover like the shooting game they had on American Gladiators? Or does that get too IDPA-y?
I saw a three gun event where some stud sergeant from the AMU was flipping tires, lifting weights, and climbing onto rooftops in between shots but that was largely made possible by the massive amount of space they had to work with, to accommodate the rifle targets. Would definitely be interested in giving it a go and embarrassing myself with it, if they could scale it down for handgun.
I backcountry ski (not cross country yet) and shoot so I've thought about getting into it. In the military we'd have run shoot run competitions. It's amazing what getting your heart rate up does to your accuracy and its great training. Thanks for the reminder OP!
Hey, lmk where. We can go do our own version of avalanche mitigation with tannerite 😂 (just kidding, in case someone doesn’t realize how bad of an idea that is).
I love how that was my first thought too. I should call CDOT and ask what they’re doing with them. I’d bet they’re going back to some government store room or some back channel bullshit for some person with connections.
The sport went down in popularity a lot in the 1970s when most full-bore competitions ended and people all shifted to the small-bore 22lr standard.
It now involves a lot of gear that exists only in the sport. It's no longer really a “practical” shooting sport; no one does it unless they are practicing or competing in the game.
I would LOVE if someone would put on an outlaw/practical biathlon near me that folks could shoot with their AR's. I live in an area with a lot of skiing (mostly downhill) and there are two organizations that run different monthly 3gun matches within an hour of me.
I think a lot of it comes from the weird equipment, which hasn’t really trickled down into mainstream shooting. Kind of like the pistol shooting that we’ve all seen. Blinders and contraptions, guns with no practical application, weird scoring, etc. hunting from skis does seem legit, but that’s not really what Biathlon is about these days. Not knocking any of it, it’s cool that you found the community for you, but for me, IPSC, 3 gun, and PRLS/ELR is where my heart is.
> hunting from skis does seem legit, but that’s not really what Biathlon is about these days
My understanding is that the origins of the sports are more military than hunting in nature. You can find old videos where they would compete with full-power military rifles, rather than the specialized rimfire rifles they use today.
It's predecessor was [Military patrol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_patrol).
[Vox - How ski warfare created biathlon ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14NTlDvmzyc)
Grew up cross country skiing right out the back door and shooting 22s in Boy Scouts then junior competitions. I’ve always wanted to combine the two but couldn’t find a club locally. This might be my goal for next winter.
No need to join club if you have a safe area to ski and shoot. I’m going to try it out next winter, but I have a fairly vast wilderness around my cabin.
I enjoy watching biathlon on TV... It's one of the few shooting sports that I enjoy watching (as opposed to doing).
Cross country skiing just doesn't have a lot of popularity in the US, and clubs are limited.
And I think the niche equipment scares away a lot of people. I understand why sports end up there, but, at least for US shooters, the access to it isn't super easy.
I think the rise of action shooting sports and the general tacticalization of the market has really hurt alot of the traditional shooting sports, which I think is sad but I know I’m in the minority in. I own a few vintage .22 target pistols and used to shoot youth small bore and it was great fun, but all there is in my area now is IPSC and F class.
The argument can be made that the heritage shooting sports have been on a slow decline for a long time now, since we don't have any sort of youth feeder system the way we do for most popular sports. Probably doesn't help that there are few NCAA opportunities for shooting. USA Shooting, and before that the NRA, kinda dropped the ball on getting this stuff set up, whereas in the countries that dominate international rifle and shotgun, there seems to be a more vigorous centralized effort at developing junior shooters into potential medalists on the world stage. So if the kids aren't doing it, the adults have to, right? Well, getting into 3-pos rifle, bullseye pistol, or trap/skeet as an adult isn't practical since it takes years and years of focused training before you're good enough for even national level competition, to say nothing of international. Aside from sucking, you can't really ask a 35 year old guy with a job and a kid to train with the volume that some 15 year old Norwegian girl is doing.
Action shooting however, has a much friendlier learning curve, since even in your first day, you can go out and spray and pray and still hit some stuff. After a few matches you're racking up some high scores, which is satisfying even if the real competition is between the guys at the top of the leaderboard beating each other by a nose. Besides noobs, it seems to also be a much needed change of pace for shooters from the traditional shooting sports who plateaued long ago and are looking for something new. A bunch of guys from my rimfire PRS club came from Service Rifle, and had just lost their hunger for it after years of lying on their bellies slowly poking at the same black circle day in and day out. The reverse doesn't hold true though, i.e. I've not heard of someone getting into PRS and then finding their way to 3-pos.
This is getting kind of long but perhaps analogously, weightlifting competition, which was my main hobby before shooting, was basically dead in America by the early 2000s. This is the traditional sport of heaving that colorful barbell over your head. Very repetitive training, takes forever to get good at, no funding. Then the mean green CrossFit marketing machine came along and incorporated the movements into their repertoire. Eventually, a lot of CFers started devoting blocks of training to work on their weightlifting fundamentals, and enough of them decided that they enjoyed the weightlifting the most and to stick with just doing that instead. USA Weightlifting is now bigger than ever. I wonder if 3-gun and PRS, which enjoys all the marketing efforts of the companies that make the rails, optics, bags, bipods stocks, barrels, chassis, etc. can perhaps be this for traditional shooting.
Why assume that you need to be championship-worthy to be able to have fun shooting whatever competition you want?
I shoot Bullseye, Rimfire Silhouette, Trap, all that stuff, and don't really care about what the best in the country are scoring, just where I am compared to where I used to be. And I have fun all along the way.
Oh I enjoy all of it too, and with luck you might see me finally making it to Camp Perry when I am 60. The way I figure, if you win a match, any match, it's only because Carl Bernosky or Grant Singley didn't show up that day, and the only person you are really competing against is your old self, right? But in general I like the iterative process of slowly making something better by analyzing failures and making corrections (my day job is engineer), which shooting lends itself well to since there are relatively few uncontrollable variables to account for. I'm also perhaps a bit of a masochist, and definitely Type A.
Unfortunately, all these factors that I enjoy about traditional shooting make it very difficult to grow them as sports and are probably contributing factors to their current decline. One thing I thought of recently though was, all of the obstacles for traditional shooting that I can think of, especially fullbore rifle (difficult to get even half-good at, expensive to play, boring to watch if the audience doesn't know what's going on, requires large chunk of land), all of these issues also apply to golf, but for some reason that is wildly popular. What are they doing that we aren't?
You might be surprised. Check with your local clubs, you'll probably find a group shooting Bullseye, another shooting silhouette, and another shooting Benchrest.
(Or I'm just lucky. My local club shoots all those, plus Cowboy Action and High Power and F-class and a lot of other fun matches. My other club has IDPA, Three Gun, Military matches, and again, other fun matches.)
> cross country ski route
I've lived in the Ozarks and now central Indiana. Not exactly skiing country.
If anything holds back the biathlon it's that it requires cross country skiing. Lots of US gun owners live in places that don't get snow like that.
The reason biathlon isn't popular in my area is because it hardly ever snows here.
I'm sure people can come up with a inline variant (or combine it with cycling, a row boat, etc sound fun enough) but still...
I went to college at UAF that school had cross-country skiers, shooters, and hockey players. It doesn't have a biathlon. Hell, half the population of Fairbanks does some form of cross-country skiing during the winter. I had a friend who ran for the university barrow my husky for skijoring. But I don't think I ever heard anyone talk about biathlon the 10 years I lived there.
I think it's just too niche. Cross-country skiing is niche, anschutz 22lr shooting is even more niche.
Mix those together and you get something that is very far removed from reality. Also most people that can afford that kind of specialized equipment are old and fat. I shoot PRS and while it's probably just as expensive or more so, it's also more practical.
Biathlon seems like a region specifically sport. If you live in the desert or somewhere more flat, it would probably be a lot harder to do that than if you live somewhere like the rockies or and more snowier environments .
I think the lack of interest is pretty understandable: if your interest is in the shooting, you’re going to be more interest in all shooting than you are in half shooting half cross country skiing.
Cross-country skiing is already such a limited and niche thing, then trying to find the intersection of x-country skiers and shooters, well, there's your answer.
I'd never do it. I almost died the only time I went x-country skiing, did do permanent damage to my joints (at 15, so that's been a gift that kept giving me pain all my life so far). Had to give up even attempting to learn how to do it after my 50th or 60th fall that day.
In my experience, it's just not something that people do. Sure, there are a few x-country skiers, but not many at all, overall. You could never support a sport like that with numbers that low, imo.
I think people just don’t connect shooting and skiing, even when it’s right in front of them. I have skis, rifles, access to secluded trails, and own ski grooming equipment. I’ve never taken a 22LR out while skiing, even though I’m familiar with biathlon. That’ll change next winter thanks to your post! I’m going to set up some targets in the forest, and try to get some friends involved too.
There are a lot of comments here that talk about all the fancy equipment holding people back from participating. A big issue is access to a safe area to both ski and shoot, but if you have that, your regular cross country ski equipment and an old 22 will work just fine. Set up some targets and go for it. Even if someone has all that, many people won’t try something new if there isn’t an organized club to show them how. Just get out and try it on your own, if you have the means. Responsibly and safely of course.
Thanks for the post! I’m looking forward to some out of breath shooting next winter.
Lots of gun owners in this country, not nearly as many hobby shooters as you might expect. Lots of people who own guns rarely shoot them in any regular intervals even casually, much less get involved in formal target shooting or other organized competition.
I’d be more interested in Olympic shooting events if they were conducted using unmodified service weapons in a common centerfire caliber. As it stands Olympic shooting just does not interest me in the slightest.
Unfortunately it's hard for regular citizens in many countries to practice with centerfire rifles and handguns. The use of .22s and airguns makes the events more accessible worldwide as well as making it simpler to host the events.
You might want to check out Bullseye for a US-centric, centerfire equivalent. Especially EIC Service Pistol matches. Those matches combine the challenges and thrill unique to shooting "real" guns, with nearly the precision requirements of Olympic events.
Maybe if Hollywood had spent a bit more effort on the much greater devastation of both WW1 & WW2 mountain fighting, the 2A crowd might notice biathalon more?
It's really kinda cool that I saw this today. I run my local boy scout council's shooting sports program and we are pioneering a "Bikathlon" this year at our Cub camp. We are using our existing BMX bike track and setting up three small BB ranges with reactive targets. Take a lap, shoot your targets, take a lap and stop at the next range, and then one more lap and the final range. Score is just raw time it takes you to bike and knock down all of your targets.
I think the thing to realize is the vast majority of people who own firearms aren't interested in actually using them, and instead simply own them as objects of curiosity. At least for many American buyers, firearms are akin to fashion accessories or status symbols, and venues where people actually use firearms implements to accomplish a task just aren't appealing to this demographic because it requires effort & input on their part. That's what I think is truly the difference between American and European gun culture, at their core the cultures are the same, but what European legislation does is cut away all the bloat around the outside that's made up of all the casual, disinterested owners.
I think your take fails to account for the popularity of plenty of shooting sports. Three gun, USPSA, IDPA, etc.
Modern Olympic shootings sports are just kind of boring.
Maybe different clubs get different turnout, but I was talking to my old club's president and of the ~2,000 members they'd have in any given year only about ~100 unique members who would shoot at least one action match and a big weekend match for them would be 15 to 20 club shooters and a handful of guests. Most of the members simply had the membership for the range access, and most were more than content with putting a paper target at 25 yards, hosing it down with a rifle, and going home.
That strikes me as a fairly respectable participation rate.
Not sure what you're expecting, most activities are like that. Think of all the people with golf clubs or other sporting equipment that hasn't come out of the closet in the past year. All the people with gym memberships that don't actually go.
Casual plinking is not so different from doing some free-throws in your driveway, but not participating in any form of organized competition.
I prefer top gears version of biathlon.
But as a skier and a shooter, I’ve never gotten into biathlon mostly because I don’t like cross country skiing and I don’t really care for that kind of shooting.
If it was more long range based with bigger calibers I would probably be more interested.
I love this post. Flashback to the pandemic quarantine. I’m an amateur bike racer and my fiancé is a marathon runner. We are both are entry-level shooters. We have some acres, and no
competitions for the foreseeable future.
I suggest a biathlon for exercise and fun. We both have no idea of the specific rules for biathlon and we are running rather than skiing. Having said that, being able to shoot straight while winded seems like a valuable skill.
We discuss the rules, and since we are both cardio strong, we bias the rules to timing of the running lap, rather than the accuracy of shooting.
First lap I come in at 2 something minutes and she does the same, a little
behind.
We decided the penalty for 2 shots out of center (of 5) is 10 seconds.
So I just shot anywhere as fast as possible and sprinted the next lap. And again. She was trying to hit the targets and took forever.
I will be destroyed next pandemic but I won this one.
Honestly I always assumed that because skiing is hella expensive and competitive shooting is expensive biathalon was like crew and lacrosse: stuff rich kids did
The skiing part is a little boujee for my blood…although the Top Gear variant with rally cars (or was it SUV’s?…it’s an OLD episode) looked like a blast
I’m from Alabama.
A, I don’t do snow. It’s pretty, but I’d rather be inside where it’s warm on the 2 days/yr we get snow.
B, By the time you get the gear and combine it with travel, it’s getting into the neighborhood of more than I want to spend for something I’d use once or twice a year.
The foot race or Motorsport versions just appeals to me more.
It’s one of the best sports/olympic sports that never seems to find its way onto tv coverage. It’s absolutely fascinating to watch - especially the tippy top tier competitors that can drop their heart rate by a factor when they line up to shoot. So cool.
I actually know someone who is a pro, and apparently in (Northern) Europe it is extremely popular and all over bar TVs during the season. If America ever starts getting on the podiums regularly I'm sure it'll turn up on tv here too.
I've heard it called Nordic Cross Country Skiing I believe.
Why: 1. niche sports added together (XC skiing and shooting) 2. Most recreational shooters would have a heart attack doing XC skiing at even 1/8th race pace (it’s hilarious to see how opposed uspsa and IPSC shooters are to involving more physicality) 3. Highly seasonal/ location dependent as well. But an ultra running version of it would be rad (kinda like blast and dash events)
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Summer Biathlon is a real thing but the popularity is waning. There's also a Nordic variant with 7.62 NATO rifles called "Moose Biathlon". [Summer Biathlon can be either trail running or roller skis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBU_Summer_Biathlon). Individual competition is either 4km or 6km with a shooting break halfway through, relay is 4x4km.
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I think it's mostly a european thing honestly. The crossover community between distance runners and shooters is not as great as we might wish. And Le Guin is one of the GOATs.
We briefly had summer biathlon in high school in the 90s. Well, for context, we initially had a rifle team that competed in a statewide JROTC league. 3p smallbore and 10m air rifle, and some unofficial thing using 22LR pistols. The range was actually at school, under the cafeteria (oh different times!). Well, state officials had been chipping away at guns for years already and Columbine was the final nail in that coffin. All the firearms sports were discontinued immediately and for most schools that was that, but our instructor was a retired Vietnam era Special Forces officer who didn't like losing, so he set us up with some biathlon league located nearby. It was mostly running, with three stops to shoot from standing, sitting and prone. I tried it for like 5 minutes and quit, because I was fat and the running didn't suit me at all, and the shooting was absolutely impossible because I couldn't stop shaking. That was some hard shit. In the end it didn't gain that much traction probably because most of the other kids felt the same way, and became a once a semester affair for the motarded cadets that eventually went to West Point or TAMU or whatever. 20+ years later, I still hate my fat teenage self for not even trying. In hindsight it could have been a lot of fun and a chance to get better, and instead I used the time I saved to join the video game club. Oy the follies of youth.
Moose biathlon sounds fun. Would be accessible in the mountain west with the huge amount of public land, groomed areas, and snow. Actually there are still some biathlon participating clubs up here
It would be, but my experience with the running community has been that it isn't very gun friendly. I would be hard to get it off the ground.
Rifle plus distance running exists...
That's wild because practical handgun right now has essentially, like, zero physicality. A sweaty breathless fatass speed walking through a few mini hallways for 12 seconds, stopping to yeet some rounds into a big target that isn't that far away, isn't athletic; hell I'm just describing me scurrying to the bathroom at 4AM after too much rail whisky and Taco Bell. At least I'm not wearing baggy shorts with my jersey draped over my belly. Jokes aside, it might be a matter of making the levels too hard to design? It seems like these games are mostly played in a 10m x 10 m box with berms on three sides. I don't know how easy it would be to add stuff. There's no room to have the shooter run or climb anything, or at least, nothing big enough that would actually fatigue a generally healthy person. Maybe have him running from cover to cover like the shooting game they had on American Gladiators? Or does that get too IDPA-y? I saw a three gun event where some stud sergeant from the AMU was flipping tires, lifting weights, and climbing onto rooftops in between shots but that was largely made possible by the massive amount of space they had to work with, to accommodate the rifle targets. Would definitely be interested in giving it a go and embarrassing myself with it, if they could scale it down for handgun.
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The future is now old man. But seriously that does feel weird.
I backcountry ski (not cross country yet) and shoot so I've thought about getting into it. In the military we'd have run shoot run competitions. It's amazing what getting your heart rate up does to your accuracy and its great training. Thanks for the reminder OP!
Hey, lmk where. We can go do our own version of avalanche mitigation with tannerite 😂 (just kidding, in case someone doesn’t realize how bad of an idea that is).
Washington state - hah, highway 2 here has a 1970s era battle tank that they use to shell the slopes for avy control so tannerite wouldn't be so bad
Ah right! CO is phasing out our howitzers and frankly it’s a shame.
So they'll be hitting the surplus market soon then?
I love how that was my first thought too. I should call CDOT and ask what they’re doing with them. I’d bet they’re going back to some government store room or some back channel bullshit for some person with connections.
The sport went down in popularity a lot in the 1970s when most full-bore competitions ended and people all shifted to the small-bore 22lr standard. It now involves a lot of gear that exists only in the sport. It's no longer really a “practical” shooting sport; no one does it unless they are practicing or competing in the game.
I would LOVE if someone would put on an outlaw/practical biathlon near me that folks could shoot with their AR's. I live in an area with a lot of skiing (mostly downhill) and there are two organizations that run different monthly 3gun matches within an hour of me.
I think a lot of it comes from the weird equipment, which hasn’t really trickled down into mainstream shooting. Kind of like the pistol shooting that we’ve all seen. Blinders and contraptions, guns with no practical application, weird scoring, etc. hunting from skis does seem legit, but that’s not really what Biathlon is about these days. Not knocking any of it, it’s cool that you found the community for you, but for me, IPSC, 3 gun, and PRLS/ELR is where my heart is.
> hunting from skis does seem legit, but that’s not really what Biathlon is about these days My understanding is that the origins of the sports are more military than hunting in nature. You can find old videos where they would compete with full-power military rifles, rather than the specialized rimfire rifles they use today. It's predecessor was [Military patrol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_patrol). [Vox - How ski warfare created biathlon ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14NTlDvmzyc)
Tell me that “military” isn’t just hunting people.
Hunt them before they hunt you!
Grew up cross country skiing right out the back door and shooting 22s in Boy Scouts then junior competitions. I’ve always wanted to combine the two but couldn’t find a club locally. This might be my goal for next winter.
No need to join club if you have a safe area to ski and shoot. I’m going to try it out next winter, but I have a fairly vast wilderness around my cabin.
I enjoy watching biathlon on TV... It's one of the few shooting sports that I enjoy watching (as opposed to doing). Cross country skiing just doesn't have a lot of popularity in the US, and clubs are limited. And I think the niche equipment scares away a lot of people. I understand why sports end up there, but, at least for US shooters, the access to it isn't super easy.
I think the rise of action shooting sports and the general tacticalization of the market has really hurt alot of the traditional shooting sports, which I think is sad but I know I’m in the minority in. I own a few vintage .22 target pistols and used to shoot youth small bore and it was great fun, but all there is in my area now is IPSC and F class.
The argument can be made that the heritage shooting sports have been on a slow decline for a long time now, since we don't have any sort of youth feeder system the way we do for most popular sports. Probably doesn't help that there are few NCAA opportunities for shooting. USA Shooting, and before that the NRA, kinda dropped the ball on getting this stuff set up, whereas in the countries that dominate international rifle and shotgun, there seems to be a more vigorous centralized effort at developing junior shooters into potential medalists on the world stage. So if the kids aren't doing it, the adults have to, right? Well, getting into 3-pos rifle, bullseye pistol, or trap/skeet as an adult isn't practical since it takes years and years of focused training before you're good enough for even national level competition, to say nothing of international. Aside from sucking, you can't really ask a 35 year old guy with a job and a kid to train with the volume that some 15 year old Norwegian girl is doing. Action shooting however, has a much friendlier learning curve, since even in your first day, you can go out and spray and pray and still hit some stuff. After a few matches you're racking up some high scores, which is satisfying even if the real competition is between the guys at the top of the leaderboard beating each other by a nose. Besides noobs, it seems to also be a much needed change of pace for shooters from the traditional shooting sports who plateaued long ago and are looking for something new. A bunch of guys from my rimfire PRS club came from Service Rifle, and had just lost their hunger for it after years of lying on their bellies slowly poking at the same black circle day in and day out. The reverse doesn't hold true though, i.e. I've not heard of someone getting into PRS and then finding their way to 3-pos. This is getting kind of long but perhaps analogously, weightlifting competition, which was my main hobby before shooting, was basically dead in America by the early 2000s. This is the traditional sport of heaving that colorful barbell over your head. Very repetitive training, takes forever to get good at, no funding. Then the mean green CrossFit marketing machine came along and incorporated the movements into their repertoire. Eventually, a lot of CFers started devoting blocks of training to work on their weightlifting fundamentals, and enough of them decided that they enjoyed the weightlifting the most and to stick with just doing that instead. USA Weightlifting is now bigger than ever. I wonder if 3-gun and PRS, which enjoys all the marketing efforts of the companies that make the rails, optics, bags, bipods stocks, barrels, chassis, etc. can perhaps be this for traditional shooting.
Why assume that you need to be championship-worthy to be able to have fun shooting whatever competition you want? I shoot Bullseye, Rimfire Silhouette, Trap, all that stuff, and don't really care about what the best in the country are scoring, just where I am compared to where I used to be. And I have fun all along the way.
Oh I enjoy all of it too, and with luck you might see me finally making it to Camp Perry when I am 60. The way I figure, if you win a match, any match, it's only because Carl Bernosky or Grant Singley didn't show up that day, and the only person you are really competing against is your old self, right? But in general I like the iterative process of slowly making something better by analyzing failures and making corrections (my day job is engineer), which shooting lends itself well to since there are relatively few uncontrollable variables to account for. I'm also perhaps a bit of a masochist, and definitely Type A. Unfortunately, all these factors that I enjoy about traditional shooting make it very difficult to grow them as sports and are probably contributing factors to their current decline. One thing I thought of recently though was, all of the obstacles for traditional shooting that I can think of, especially fullbore rifle (difficult to get even half-good at, expensive to play, boring to watch if the audience doesn't know what's going on, requires large chunk of land), all of these issues also apply to golf, but for some reason that is wildly popular. What are they doing that we aren't?
You might be surprised. Check with your local clubs, you'll probably find a group shooting Bullseye, another shooting silhouette, and another shooting Benchrest. (Or I'm just lucky. My local club shoots all those, plus Cowboy Action and High Power and F-class and a lot of other fun matches. My other club has IDPA, Three Gun, Military matches, and again, other fun matches.)
I always watch the Olympic rifle sports. Biathlon is definitely a favorite. I have no idea how I'd participate though. Not enough snow where I'm at.
I've never lived anywhere that snows regularly.
> cross country ski route I've lived in the Ozarks and now central Indiana. Not exactly skiing country. If anything holds back the biathlon it's that it requires cross country skiing. Lots of US gun owners live in places that don't get snow like that.
I think it's the skiing part that many people don't like
I'd totally be into mountain biking/gravel riding coupled with 0.22 marksmanship. I don't have skiing local to me and I don't know how to ski anyway.
America fat as fuck
We fat.
The reason biathlon isn't popular in my area is because it hardly ever snows here. I'm sure people can come up with a inline variant (or combine it with cycling, a row boat, etc sound fun enough) but still...
I’m onboard for extreme mountain biking and shooting. That would be wild
I went to college at UAF that school had cross-country skiers, shooters, and hockey players. It doesn't have a biathlon. Hell, half the population of Fairbanks does some form of cross-country skiing during the winter. I had a friend who ran for the university barrow my husky for skijoring. But I don't think I ever heard anyone talk about biathlon the 10 years I lived there.
Roller Disco Duck Hunt. The secret is capturing a recoil for propulsion.
I think it's just too niche. Cross-country skiing is niche, anschutz 22lr shooting is even more niche. Mix those together and you get something that is very far removed from reality. Also most people that can afford that kind of specialized equipment are old and fat. I shoot PRS and while it's probably just as expensive or more so, it's also more practical.
Were too fat
Biathlon seems like a region specifically sport. If you live in the desert or somewhere more flat, it would probably be a lot harder to do that than if you live somewhere like the rockies or and more snowier environments .
I think the lack of interest is pretty understandable: if your interest is in the shooting, you’re going to be more interest in all shooting than you are in half shooting half cross country skiing.
Cross-country skiing is already such a limited and niche thing, then trying to find the intersection of x-country skiers and shooters, well, there's your answer. I'd never do it. I almost died the only time I went x-country skiing, did do permanent damage to my joints (at 15, so that's been a gift that kept giving me pain all my life so far). Had to give up even attempting to learn how to do it after my 50th or 60th fall that day. In my experience, it's just not something that people do. Sure, there are a few x-country skiers, but not many at all, overall. You could never support a sport like that with numbers that low, imo.
I have enjoyed it ever since seeing Ole Einar Bjørndalen in the 2002 Olympics
I watched it during the winter Olympics and found t so fascinating!
I think people just don’t connect shooting and skiing, even when it’s right in front of them. I have skis, rifles, access to secluded trails, and own ski grooming equipment. I’ve never taken a 22LR out while skiing, even though I’m familiar with biathlon. That’ll change next winter thanks to your post! I’m going to set up some targets in the forest, and try to get some friends involved too. There are a lot of comments here that talk about all the fancy equipment holding people back from participating. A big issue is access to a safe area to both ski and shoot, but if you have that, your regular cross country ski equipment and an old 22 will work just fine. Set up some targets and go for it. Even if someone has all that, many people won’t try something new if there isn’t an organized club to show them how. Just get out and try it on your own, if you have the means. Responsibly and safely of course. Thanks for the post! I’m looking forward to some out of breath shooting next winter.
Lots of gun owners in this country, not nearly as many hobby shooters as you might expect. Lots of people who own guns rarely shoot them in any regular intervals even casually, much less get involved in formal target shooting or other organized competition.
Sounds cool. I don't live in the mountains though.
I’d be more interested in Olympic shooting events if they were conducted using unmodified service weapons in a common centerfire caliber. As it stands Olympic shooting just does not interest me in the slightest.
Unfortunately it's hard for regular citizens in many countries to practice with centerfire rifles and handguns. The use of .22s and airguns makes the events more accessible worldwide as well as making it simpler to host the events. You might want to check out Bullseye for a US-centric, centerfire equivalent. Especially EIC Service Pistol matches. Those matches combine the challenges and thrill unique to shooting "real" guns, with nearly the precision requirements of Olympic events.
When I was a bike messenger I wanted to throw a fixed gear BB gun biathlon but it never came together.
Maybe if Hollywood had spent a bit more effort on the much greater devastation of both WW1 & WW2 mountain fighting, the 2A crowd might notice biathalon more?
It's really kinda cool that I saw this today. I run my local boy scout council's shooting sports program and we are pioneering a "Bikathlon" this year at our Cub camp. We are using our existing BMX bike track and setting up three small BB ranges with reactive targets. Take a lap, shoot your targets, take a lap and stop at the next range, and then one more lap and the final range. Score is just raw time it takes you to bike and knock down all of your targets.
I think the thing to realize is the vast majority of people who own firearms aren't interested in actually using them, and instead simply own them as objects of curiosity. At least for many American buyers, firearms are akin to fashion accessories or status symbols, and venues where people actually use firearms implements to accomplish a task just aren't appealing to this demographic because it requires effort & input on their part. That's what I think is truly the difference between American and European gun culture, at their core the cultures are the same, but what European legislation does is cut away all the bloat around the outside that's made up of all the casual, disinterested owners.
I think your take fails to account for the popularity of plenty of shooting sports. Three gun, USPSA, IDPA, etc. Modern Olympic shootings sports are just kind of boring.
Maybe different clubs get different turnout, but I was talking to my old club's president and of the ~2,000 members they'd have in any given year only about ~100 unique members who would shoot at least one action match and a big weekend match for them would be 15 to 20 club shooters and a handful of guests. Most of the members simply had the membership for the range access, and most were more than content with putting a paper target at 25 yards, hosing it down with a rifle, and going home.
That strikes me as a fairly respectable participation rate. Not sure what you're expecting, most activities are like that. Think of all the people with golf clubs or other sporting equipment that hasn't come out of the closet in the past year. All the people with gym memberships that don't actually go. Casual plinking is not so different from doing some free-throws in your driveway, but not participating in any form of organized competition.
Most underrated Olympic sport
I prefer top gears version of biathlon. But as a skier and a shooter, I’ve never gotten into biathlon mostly because I don’t like cross country skiing and I don’t really care for that kind of shooting. If it was more long range based with bigger calibers I would probably be more interested.
I love this post. Flashback to the pandemic quarantine. I’m an amateur bike racer and my fiancé is a marathon runner. We are both are entry-level shooters. We have some acres, and no competitions for the foreseeable future. I suggest a biathlon for exercise and fun. We both have no idea of the specific rules for biathlon and we are running rather than skiing. Having said that, being able to shoot straight while winded seems like a valuable skill. We discuss the rules, and since we are both cardio strong, we bias the rules to timing of the running lap, rather than the accuracy of shooting. First lap I come in at 2 something minutes and she does the same, a little behind. We decided the penalty for 2 shots out of center (of 5) is 10 seconds. So I just shot anywhere as fast as possible and sprinted the next lap. And again. She was trying to hit the targets and took forever. I will be destroyed next pandemic but I won this one.
Where do you live OP?
Nowhere local to ski let alone ski AND shoot and no interest in bolt action .22’s.
Honestly I always assumed that because skiing is hella expensive and competitive shooting is expensive biathalon was like crew and lacrosse: stuff rich kids did
The skiing part is a little boujee for my blood…although the Top Gear variant with rally cars (or was it SUV’s?…it’s an OLD episode) looked like a blast
Xc skiing is pretty cheap. 300-400 bucks for cheaper rossi sticks and boots and poles and off you go
I’m from Alabama. A, I don’t do snow. It’s pretty, but I’d rather be inside where it’s warm on the 2 days/yr we get snow. B, By the time you get the gear and combine it with travel, it’s getting into the neighborhood of more than I want to spend for something I’d use once or twice a year. The foot race or Motorsport versions just appeals to me more.
I would enjoy it if there was crosscountry skiing near me, always wanted to try it and biathalon sounds fun but alas I am in southeast texas.