Bullet-less biathlete ‘shoots self in foot’ Norwegian drops to 12th

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PRESQUE ISLE – Biathlon combines cross-country skiing with target shooting. So you’d think bullets would be an important thing to remember when preparing for a race, such as the junior women’s 10-kilometer pursuit event of the 2006 Biathlon Junior World Championships held Sunday at the Nordic Heritage Ski Center.

Except Julie Bonnevie-Svendsen of Norway forgot to load her rifle before starting the race in fourth place.

That miscue, plus another later in the race, dropped her to 12th place. But Bonnevie-Svendsen had a good attitude about it a few hours after the race ended.

“I just had to laugh, you know?” she said. “It’s not supposed to happen.”

Monday was a training day and the competition resumes today.

Bonnevie-Svendsen’s troubles Sunday started when pulled into the first shooting stage, which is done in the prone position. She was shooting at point three, which means she had moved up a spot during the first ski loop.

“I got in to start shooting, not far behind [the leader], and I thought, this is going really great,” she said. “I was about to start and I don’t know … I remembered that I had forgotten to actually put the bullets in the magazine. So there I was without bullets.”

Maine Winter Sports Center official Max Saenger, who is helping to run the races, oversaw what happened next. Bonnevie-Svendsen raised her hand to get an official’s attention, and Saenger went over to find out what was going on. He happened to have five bullets in his pocket, but she wanted the bullets she had tested earlier in the day.

Bonnevie-Svendsen yelled over to the Norwegian coach. Saenger went over to him – coaches aren’t allowed on the range – and he handed Saenger a box of five bullets. Saenger put the five bullets down on the mat and watched Bonnevie-Svendsen load her rifle. Amazingly, she hit all five targets and skied off.

When she came in to shoot in the next stage, Saenger had three more magazines ready for her. She loaded up her rifle and continued the race.

Bonnevie-Svendsen missed three targets over the second and third stages. She missed four in the final stage, and that’s where things went wrong again. For each miss on the shooting range, biathletes must ski a 150-meter penalty loop. Instead of skiing four loops, Bonnevie-Svendsen skied just three.

In that case, a two-minute time penalty is added to the biathlete’s final time. Bonnevie-Svendsen crossed the finish line in third place, but her penalty time put her in 12th place in the final results.

“It just wasn’t my day,” she said. “… I just have to look toward the next race, and I did my best today. It was my mistake, so I can’t blame anyone.”

Saenger said the Norwegian coach told him immediately that Bonnevie-Svendsen hadn’t skied all the penalty loops.

“This is a great testimony to the fair play that the Norwegians have in all their sports,” he said.

Bonnevie-Svendsen, 18, has been in biathlon for 10 years. And she’s already had success on the international level with a 15th place in the individual event at a recent World Cup in Hochfilzen. But sometimes things happen.

“Usually we only see where everything goes perfect in every one of the hundreds of details, but it happens to all of us,” Saenger said. “… You’re gonna forget some detail somewhere.”

Attendance in the thousands

It was hard to tell standing in the stadium area, but Maine Winter Sports Center president Andy Shepard put attendance at about 4,500 for the weekend.

The stadium grandstand holds 500 people, but Shepard said there were even more in the spectator tents, while others followed the biathletes along the trails and watched from the bridge that spans part of the race course and the penalty loop.

A large potato field on Route 167 that is being used for park-and-ride shuttle buses was filled, Shepard added, and buses loaded with about 45 people each left the parking area every five minutes for about an hour-and-a-half at one point Sunday.

UMPI coach aids Greenland team

Kris Cheney Seymour never imagined he would be spending his week coaching a team in the junior world championships – much less a team from Greenland.

But that’s the position he finds himself in. Seymour, a former Maine Winter Sports Center biathlon coach who is now the cross country ski coach and a lecturer at UMaine-Presque Isle, has been acting as the coach and team leader for the four-person team from Greenland.

Greenland has a small, relatively new biathlon association, so the officials there knew they weren’t going to be able to afford to send over a guide for the skiers. The association contacted the organizing committee in Presque Isle, which in turn asked Seymour if he would be willing to work with Greenland.

“I incorporated it into my life for the week,” he said with a smile. “They haven’t been doing it too long but they’re quite good. And I think they work very hard.”

Seymour has also incorporated the experience into the classroom. He is the head of UMPI’s cross county ski coaching program, a two-year-old concentration with the physical education department that he said is the only such collegiate program in the country.

Seymour’s four students, who are also members of the UMPI ski team, are assisting him as part of their classes. They attend meetings, help zero the sights, transport the biathletes, and wax skis, among other responsibilities.

“They all have something they’re in charge of,” Seymour said. “All the things that a coach does.”

Three of the four Greelandic biathletes speak English, but one only speaks Danish and a native Greenlandic language. Greenland is a province of Denmark.

Luckily, one of Seymour’s UMPI students and a MWSC team member, Bjorn Bakken of Duluth, Minn., speaks Danish and so has served as a translator. Bakken is himself a biathlete and finished 10th at the Olympic trials in Fort Kent earlier this month.

Chileans learning to shoot

Another small team arrived Sunday and is sharing a wax room with Seymour and the Greenland team.

Three biathletes from the fledgling biathlon program in Chile arrived Sunday. They’ll take part in Tuesday and Wednesday’s individual races.

For the three Chileans, it will be the first time they’ve competed in a true biathlon race. They’re participated in cross-country competitions, but they hadn’t fired a biathlon rifle until Monday’s training rounds.

“We just want to participate in these world championships,” said Bernardo Zapata, 24, who has competed in true biathlon competitions in South America for two years and is serving as the team’s coach and escort.

“It’s very important to our country to be here in these big championships and begin with juniors in biathlon,” he added. “We are starting, and we are very strong.”

Begonia Araneda, a 15-year-old youth woman, was pleased with her results shooting for the first time. She hit all five shots in the prone position and hit two in the standing. The standing position is considered to be much harder.

The Chileans don’t have junior rifles, so they’re using adult rifles instead.

“It’s light and you can’t feel it,” she said through a translator. “It’s good to have the experience.”

Areneda won a junior national cross country ski race in Chile last year, Zapata said.

The Biathlon Federation of Chile will be recognized by the country’s Olympic committee in March, Zapata said.

The Chileans had a 13-hour plane ride from Santiago, Chile.