The Saga Of The French Teammate-Defrauder Taught Me To Appreciate The Essence Of Biathlon

To the layperson, biathlon may be the strangest sport in the Winter Olympics. Most of the sports in the Games involve athletes testing the limits of the human body vis-á-vis gravity (e.g.: big air, ski jumping), sliding (curling, speedskating), or gravity and sliding (figure skating), emphasizing in the process the wintry specificity of it all. Say what you want about curling—and I will: It's fine!—but you cannot dispute that it is a game that takes place on ice. Biathlon, on the other hand, is an ungainly and somewhat seasonally ambiguous combination of cross-country skiing and shooting stuff with a gun. What does one have to do with the other? It took an athlete like Julia Simon for me to see what makes biathlon cool.

A brief note on the history of biathlon: It is the modern evolution of the military patrol event (scratch anything at the Olympics hard enough and you'll see the muscular nationalism beneath), wherein teams of skiers would ski some distance to a range, shoot some targets, then ski away. Switzerland won gold at the 1924 Olympics in Chamonix, and while the event was held thrice more, it was only as a demonstration sport. The IOC reintroduced military patrol as modern biathlon in 1960 at the Lake Tahoe Olympics, and gradually added more individual and team events with each passing decade. The Soviets (and their successors), Germans, and Norwegians dominated it for the next eight decades.

What makes a great biathlete is balance. There are surely better cross-country skiers and probably better shooters, but to excel at both the seemingly contradictory skillsets of the two sports, it takes a special athlete, someone prepared for both the exertive and meditative aspects of competition. It takes someone, in other words, like Julia Simon. With 10 World Championship gold medals to her name, a silver at the 2022 Beijing Games in mixed relay, and several World Cup first-places, the 29-year-old Frenchwoman entered these Games as a favorite across the various disciplines—but nobody was talking about that in the months preceding her trip up to Cortina. They were talking about suspended sentences, lacrimal apologies, and credit-card fraud.