PRESQUE ISLE – World Cup biathlon will return to northern Maine in 2009 and possibly the year before if the schedule allows, as Fort Kent’s 10th Mountain Center again will be host to the top biathlon athletes in the world.

U.S. Biathlon Association marketing director Max Cobb and Maine Winter Sports Center president Andy Shepard said Friday the International Biathlon Union’s eight-member executive board voted about a week ago to return to Fort Kent, site of a successful World Cup stop in March

2004.

“We have a guarantee for a World Cup in 2009 in connection with the Olympics in Vancouver,” Cobb said. “The opportunity is still available for us in 2008, so we can have World Cups in back-to-back years. We’re still pursuing that.”

Cobb and Shepard were at the Nordic Heritage Center on Friday with a group of IBU officials who were conducting a site inspection for the Junior World Biathlon Championships, which will be held here next January.

“I think [the World Cup coming back to Fort Kent] is very good,” said Slovenia’s Janez Vodicar, the IBU vice president of sport who attended Fort Kent’s World Cup in 2004.

Cobb also said Friday that the USBA has set dates for the U.S. Olympic Trials, which will be held Dec. 29-30 and Jan. 2-3 in Fort Kent. The qualifiers advance to the Olympic Games in Turin, Italy, next February.

The 2010 Winter Olympics will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia, which is the reason the IBU voted to return the World Cup to northern Maine in 2009. One World Cup stop – there are nine such events each winter – will be held in Vancouver as a pre-Olympic tune-up. So with the world’s top biathletes already in North America, Cobb and Shepard said it made sense to the IBU to have a stop in Fort Kent.

The IBU also voted to hold the 2009 world championships in Korea, which eliminates the USBA’s hopes of getting a World Cup stop in the U.S. in 2007 but makes 2008 a possibility.

“[Korea] created a whole new dynamic that even the IBU didn’t expect to happen,” Cobb said. “They have to have two World Cups there before they can have world championships, and nobody expected them to have world championships. They won by one vote at the last IBU Congress.”

Although the USBA hoped to have a World Cup in 2007, the delay gives the region more time for development. Shepard, a Yarmouth resident, said he has had “interesting” discussions with two groups about local development, including hotels. A new facility will be necessary because a dormitory at the University of Maine at Fort Kent that housed around 100 biathletes in 2004 won’t be available in 2008.

“I think the extra time is going to give us a chance to do what we need to do well,” Shepard said. “But there is still a sense of urgency, and we need to move forward. There’s still a sense that without additional development the World Cups will disappear and won’t be a part of our future.”

The 2007 dates that may have been open to Fort Kent now will be taken up by Cup stops in Korea. As for the 2008 schedule, Shepard and Cobb said the IBU needs to take into account the traditional World Cup stops in Europe that will get knocked off the schedule because of the move to Korea.

Cobb said the USBA is working on getting together another international event for the time slot in which the World Cup would have gone in 2007.

World Cup dates for 2008 will be announced around September 2006.

Although both Maine Winter Sports Center facilities in Fort Kent and Presque Isle are equipped to host a World Cup, the fact that the 2004 Cup stop in Fort Kent was so successful and Presque Isle is untested in major international competition made the 10th Mountain Center a natural for 2009. More than 15,000 spectators watched the four-day March 2004 World Cup at the 10th Mountain Center.

“As far as the IBU goes, Fort Kent, having hosted an event already, is one [site] that could be assigned another event,” Cobb said. “The IBU heard back from its athletes that it was absolutely one of the best first-time World Cups ever held. There was a lot of enthusiasm from the IBU.”

USBA officials hope that someday Presque Isle and Fort Kent can hold back-to-back World Cup events with a stop in Lake Placid, N.Y., as one of the World Cup traditional blocks of three Cup stops at a time. Presque Isle will get a big test starting in late January when the Nordic Heritage Center is host to the 2006 Junior World Biathlon Championships .

“The IBU knows that that’s our interest,” Shepard said. “After the world junior championships, if that’s as successful as the Fort Kent World Cup was, then it would be time for [Presque Isle to host a World Cup]. The United States makes sense [as a three-stop swing] as soon as Presque Isle becomes available. … I think there are a lot of reasons for us to be optimistic.”