French team enjoying northern Maine

PRESQUE ISLE – The French junior biathlon team was ecstatic Thursday morning when three of their young women were in the limelight receiving bronze medals for their third-place finish in the youth women relay.

Marine Dusser, Marine Bolliet and Laure Soulie, all under 19 years old, were all smiles, beaming with pride after coming in just 1 minute and 2 seconds behind the Austrian team, and just 20 seconds behind a strong Russian team at the end of the 18-kilometer race.

It was the sixth medal for the six French girls competing in the junior and youth world championships at the Nordic Heritage Center in Presque Isle. The boys teams, with four competitors, have won one medal so far.

The four coaches accompanying the 10 biathletes were beaming as well.

“It’s a superb place,” Bolliet said in French in an interview. “The people are just great.

“The big difference I find here is that everything is flat,” said the young girl, who lives in the mountains of France. “There are no mountains.”

“These girls have really worked hard to get where they are,” Lionel Laurent, head coach of the French contingent, said in French during an interview at the lodge Thursday. “They’ve come a long way, and they have done some very nice work.

“We are in a building time with the boys on the team,” he said. “They are also working hard.”

He explained that the team members work and train on their own and become a national team close to when it is time to compete internationally.

It was hard for the French team to make it to Presque Isle. One day before departure, three team members had to travel to Paris from their homes to get their passports and travel papers that had not yet been approved by American authorities.

The trip from France to Presque Isle took just over 25 hours. They left France at 5 a.m. last Wednesday and arrived in Presque Isle during the late morning Thursday.

“Coming to the United States is a long and difficult trip for us,” Laurent said. For most of these athletes, it is their first trip to the United States.

“They had been looking forward to coming to this magic land they had only heard about,” he said. “It is not a simple thing to do for them to get here.”

Laurent is in his fourth year as head coach of the French youth and junior teams. He is a former biathlete, having competed for 10 years on the French national biathlon team.

“This stadium is superb, and the organization that is putting this on is great at all levels,” he said. “It is a good site for training of biathletes.

“There is little snow on the trails, but it makes them fast and we are pleased with that,” he said. “The terrain has good rolling trails.”

He said it was too bad that the team did not have much time to be tourists while in northern Maine. They liked what they saw, but would have liked more time to travel.

“It has been 10 hard days for us since we started,” Laurent said.

He would have liked to travel farther north after being told of snow conditions in the St. John Valley and the large pocket of French-speaking Americans there. Laurent said he did not know about the French-speaking Americans living along the Canadian border.