Olsen juggling several responsibilities

FORT KENT – Call up the U.S. Biathlon headquarters in Colchester Vt., ask for information about what’s going on in the world of the skiing-and-shooting sport, and they might direct you to www.frozenbullet.com.

It’s a Web site started and maintained by 20-year-old Brian Olsen, a native of Minnesota who competes as a junior for the Maine Winter Sports Center here during the biathlon season, lives in a room at the 10th Mountain Division Lodge during the summer and attends the University of Vermont the rest of the time.

The site contains a host of information about biathlon from all over the world. Olsen reads news from Europe, translates it into English, and posts it on the site. He has links to rankings, information about biathlon, club contacts and other resources. It’s well-read by many of the athletes, and the four-time junior national champion is gaining experience as a working journalist as he interviews athletes and files daily stories from the media room here.

But the Web site nearly got him in trouble with the NCAA after he decided to compete for Vermont this winter. It’s just one of several quirky things that have happened to Olsen as the junior and youth season came to an end.

Olsen decided in February to join up with the Catamounts’ cross country ski team because he had a big break in his schedule between the January junior world championships, where he finished 14th in the sprint, and the junior nationals in March. Olsen said the Vermont coach wanted him on the team, and considering that he is a full-time student, Olsen didn’t think joining up would be a problem.

But it was, as Olsen found out when Vermont’s NCAA compliance official called him. It seems that Olsen’s personal site, which is separate from frozenbullet.com (but is still accessed at the same site) had a section where he thanked his sponsors.

Olsen does have the insignias of companies like Adidas and Rossignol on the front of his site. But the compliance officer took issue with the contents of the sponsor section.

Parts of the section reads, “I would like to personally thank each and every one of my personal and team sponsors. Without them, my dreams would never have been realized. Please honor them with your patronage.”

Olsen doesn’t actually endorse any specific products on the site, but he took that section of the site down while he was in a Vermont uniform.

“You’re not allowed to endorse products and they interpreted my Web site, parts of that, to be endorsements,” he said. “They originally told me I would not be allowed to participate.”

Olsen found out about the glitch on a Wednesday, two days before he was to leave for a college cross-country race in Hanover, N.H. He dealt with the NCAA and they agreed to allow him to compete after the sponsor section came down. He left Thursday night after attending a college class about the Russian mafia and logged a 10th at the competition in Hanover.

Things didn’t brighten up from there.

Olsen’s rifle was stolen from his car at the World Cup competitions in Lake Placid, N.Y. last week. The $2,800 rifle was insured, but Olsen didn’t get his replacement until about 30 minutes before Tuesday’s junior national sprint championship here, so he had to use the extra U.S. team gun.

Normally, he said, it takes a few weeks to get used to a gun. His first practice shots didn’t exactly go where he wanted to go and he wound up in 10th place.

“My first shots were actually on the targets adjacent, so I had a lot of clicks, a lot of adjustments,” said Olsen, who was also involved in a minor car accident Sunday when he drove through a snowstorm coming from Lake Placid, N.Y. “But it was a lot of bad things coming together. It’s just disappointing to have happen because it was my last race as a junior before I’m a senior next year.”

Olsen was in Lake Placid serving as media for that town’s World Cup stop.

The site is apparently quite well read, and surprisingly for Olsen, by Americans. In December Olsen ran a check of how many hits he had, coming up with a number of around 6,800 per month. He estimates that number to be around 10,000 now.

About 80 percent of those hits are coming from the U.S., where biathlon isn’t a popular sport.

“That’s more than 10 times the number of people that are USBA members,” he said.

Olsen started the site in December 2001 with a focus on cross country, but quickly expanded to biathlon when he couldn’t find any media covering either sport. And there was nothing to counter the official sites, such usbiathlon.com.

Olsen’s latest project is putting up biographies of the people running for spots on the U.S. Biathlon board of directors. He wants to make sure voters are informed about their choices.

“You need independent media,” Olsen said. “It’s a checkmark. It’s like politics and in some ways biathlon’s the same way. We have an organization making decisions for the athletes. Sometimes they don’t make the right decisions, sometimes they do. It’s important to represent both sides.”