FORT KENT – The blue bag with gold lettering and green identification tag sat undisturbed outside the door of the waxing station Saturday morning. Technicians carrying skis walked toward the biathlon course at the Maine Winter Sports Center, avoiding the fabric tote.

About 50 minutes earlier the bag had been stowed in a trailer. Also packed away somewhere was a rifle. Things had wrapped up for U.S. biathlete Rachel Steer at the World Cup, and her equipment was packed and ready to go. Next stop: Oslo, Norway, the final World Cup site of the season. The U.S. team was to fly out Sunday because none of the Americans had qualified for the mass start, which was the final event of the Fort Kent Cup.

But here it was, about 8:45 a.m. Saturday, and that blue bag, its bright green I.D. tag with Steer’s name in capital letters hanging off a handle, had to be dragged off the van. The rifle had to be reassembled.

The 26-year-old Alaska native with the rust-colored hair and diamond chip in her front tooth – who had gone dancing the night before because she thought she was done for the week – had a date with the women’s 12.5-kilometer mass start.

Steer learned at about 8:05 a.m. that enough women had dropped out to boost her into the 10 a.m. race, becoming the first American woman ever to participate in a mass start at the international level.

The top 30 athletes in the World Cup rankings qualify for the mass start. Steer was 37th after Friday’s pursuit.

She wasn’t the first American ever in a mass start – Jeremy Teela logged a 28th-place finish in the 2003 world championships – but the significance was huge for the program and Steer.

“That’s pretty neat, isn’t it?” she said, standing in the finishing area after the race. “I didn’t think about that. It’s an honor, really neat, and it’s cool that I got to do it here. It was pretty awesome.”

It probably won’t seem impressive. Of the 29 women who completed the race, she was last – three minutes and three seconds behind winner Olga Pyleva of Russia. But Steer’s finish seemed almost irrelevant compared to the importance of the moment.

“It’s a big step for us,” said Steve Sands, the executive director of the U.S. Biathlon Association. “Rachel has really done a fantastic job this year and it’s good to see.”

In the mass start event, the 30 competitors line up in three rows of 10 depending on one’s ranking in the Cup standings. The group starts all at once and completes four shooting stages – two in the prone position, two standing – and five loops of the course.

Steer started out strong with no penalties in the first prone shooting stage, and was ninth after the rest of the field cleared the range. But as happened in many of the Americans’ races last week, she fell behind during the skiing portions and couldn’t recover.

Steer fell to 29th after two misses in the second prone stage. She moved up to 25th after cleaning the first standing shooting stage and came to the final standing stage in 27th, but had a penalty and finished 29th.

She hit 90 percent of her targets in the three competitions.

Steer didn’t want to make excuses after the race, but admitted she was unprepared. She thought her World Cup in Fort Kent was done even though she was listed as the third alternate for the mass start on the start list Friday afternoon.

Steer cut loose Friday night, dancing to the J.P. Leblanc Band (an “awesome” band that played “awesome” music) in the beer tent off Main Street, and went to sleep at 12:30. She was up at about 6 the next morning.

Saturday morning Steer took apart her rifle and packed away the components, along with the rest of her things. Five minutes after eight she was standing in the hallway outside her room when U.S. coach Algis Shalna ran toward her. At first she thought something was wrong with her family.

“He goes, ‘You’re gonna race the mass start,”‘ she recalled. “I was like, ‘Yeah, good joke, that’s pretty funny.”‘

Forty minutes later, Steer was on the course for zeroing. She hadn’t even had breakfast – just an energy bar and some orange juice.

“I didn’t do any of the recovery things I would have done [after racing Friday],” she said. “I definitely physically [and mentally] was not prepared for the race today … and so I was not feeling 100 percent out there.”

At least Steer didn’t have to worry about one crucial element – waxing her skis.

U.S. wax technicians Bernd Eisenbichler, James Upham, and Andreas Emslander also wax skis for Germany’s Ricco Gross, who is ranked third in the men’s standings. So the three techs were already set up to help Steer get ready.

“[The U.S. coaches] went and got my ski bag and they brought it up, the wax men were awesome, they were like, ‘Don’t you worry, you’re not even testing your skis, we’re gonna get your skis ready for you,'” Steer said. “Everybody was like, yeah, yeah. They were so jazzed up. It was really good energy this morning.”

Unprepared physically and mentally, told less than two hours before the 10 a.m. start that she would be racing, Steer also had one other thing working against her: she hadn’t been in a mass start since 2002, and that was a domestic race – not really a big deal. The closest thing to a mass start Steer had done was a relay, but it wasn’t the same as competing in the elite top-30 field.

“This is a whole new experience,” she said.

At least one of the European biathletes offered Steer some encouraging words as the American was changing after the race.

Second-place finisher and standings leader Liv Grete Poiree of Norway said the other athletes were aware there was an American woman in their presence.

“I wished that this can be more often and I really hope we can have some Americans be in the top,” Poiree said. “… I like when it’s different countries competing together. That makes the sport really exciting.”

Steer had managed to block out a lot of that excitement last week. All of the Americans got big cheers from the crowd during their races, but Steer had said she never really heard the fans. In fact, Steer and a few other U.S. biathletes didn’t want to hear any cheers. Too much pressure, having to shoot in front of a home crowd.

On Saturday Steer was again wearing green earplugs meant to turn loud cheering into more of a dull roar. But after each target Steer cleared, the crowd chanted the number. She took a shot and the fans behind her would yell, “One!” Her first standing shooting stage was clean, and she pushed off as the crowd yelled “Five!” and erupted.

For the first time all week, Steer conceded, she allowed the more than 6,000 fans in.

“I did hear it today,” she said. “That’s probably why I missed.”

Steer smiled.

“No, I’m just kidding.”