Veteran timer Kraus enjoys volunteering

FORT KENT – Lanny Kraus was looking directly into near blizzard snow Friday morning at an electronic clock ticking off the seconds as he carefully controlled the start of each biathlete in the sprint competition of the Olympic trials.

The veteran timer painstakingly controlled the split second takeoff of the U.S. Biathlon Team hopefuls competing at the 10th Mountain Lodge venue of the Maine Winter Sports Center. By next Tuesday, the 36 men and woman competitors will know who will fill the nine open slots for the Torino, Italy Olympics in February.

Friday, Kraus was wearing a bright green and white jacket from Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002, a black and gray woolen cap from Biathlon World Championships in Oslo, Norway in 2000, and already sporting a colorful red, white, blue and yellow pin from the Olympics in Italy next February.

It was near 70 degrees in Beaufort, S.C. where Kraus lives. Kraus, 67, traveled 1,600 miles to be a volunteer at the TD Banknorth Festival at Fort Kent. He will remain in northern Maine for more than five weeks and also will volunteer at the TD Banknorth World Junior Biathlon Championships that will be held at the Nordic Heritage Center Venue of the MWSC at Presque Isle in late January.

He was also a volunteer at the first Biathlon World Cup Competition ever held in Maine, at Fort Kent in March 2004, the Salt Lake City, Utah Olympics in 2002, and the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid, N.Y.

He’s planning to be at the Olympics in Italy in two months. He started volunteering in biathlon activities in 1976.

“I just love the sport,” he said Friday during a break in preparations for the sprint competitions. “It’s a fantastic sport, one I would probably have been in had it been around when I was younger.

“It’s the dynamics of the sport that get me,” he said. “These athletes go all out in cross-country skiing and then have to shoot rifles between heart beats.

“Here my job is to get them off correctly,” he said. “We have not had any false starts yet.”

Kraus, a 68-year-old retired veterinarian and college professor is just enthralled, not only with the sport, but with winter and now northern Maine.

His wife, who also likes the sport but is not as taken in with winter and snow as he is, allowed him the five weeks in northern Maine in exchange for a winter vacation in Hawaii after he returns.

A near-lifelong resident of Rochester, N.Y., where he was in private practice and taught veterinary courses at the University of Rochester, he also lived in the Chesapeake Bay area for a time after retirement. The winters there were still a bit long, so he went further south to Beaufort, S.C.

He’s a fishing guide in South Carolina.

“I love it there,” he said. “This, here, is my shot of winter and snow.

“At home, we have palm trees in the backyard, and we average snow for about 15 minutes a year,” he said. “Last year, it started snowing and my wife was in the shower. She made it out to see snowflakes before they stopped.

“Here, I get my fun in the snow, and there are also guns around,” said the avid sportsman.

“It’s wonderful to share something like this,” he said. “The Olympics is the greatest event humankind puts on,” he said. “Despite some politics getting into it every once in a while.”

He shared many stories of Olympic competitions he has attended at Lake Placid, Salt Lake City, Lillehammer and Innsbruck, Austria.

This week is his second trip to Fort Kent in less than two years.

“I love it here,” he said. “It’s wonderful, the people are great opening their homes to me.

“I hope I can return and go fishing here some summer,” he said. “I also love fishing.”