FORT KENT – Rachel Steer woke at midnight Friday to a howling wind. So she grabbed a pair of earplugs and went back to sleep.

“I knew I wouldn’t sleep a minute if I thought about all that wind and having to deal with that on top of some shaky shooting,” said Steer, the top-ranked U.S. woman in biathlon, who normally competes with earplugs. “One-and-one isn’t a spectacular shooting day, but considering the conditions, I’ll take it.”

Friday’s heavy snow and gusty wind made for tough conditions but also brought some redemption for Steer. One day after a disappointing finish in the individual event, the 27-year-old Anchorage, Alaska, native claimed her first victory at the U.S. Olympic biathlon trials, winning the women’s 7.5-kilometer sprint at the 10th Mountain Ski Center.

Steer toured the course in 28 minutes, 4.6 seconds, while Maine Winter Sports Center team member Lowell Bailey of Lake Placid, N.Y., won the men’s 10K race in 28:57.4.

Carolyn Treacy of Duluth, Minn., finished in second place and Sarah Konrad of Laramie, Wy., was third in the women’s race. Treacy skis for the Maine Winter Sports Center.

Fort Kent-based athletes swept the men’s top three. Bailey’s MWSC teammate, Tim Burke of Paul Smiths, N.Y., placed second and 2002 Olympian Jeremy Teela of Jericho, Vt., took third. Teela lives and trains part of the year in Fort Kent.

About 100 spectators watched the sprint races from the stands and the lodge. Competition will take a break for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, and resume Monday at 10 a.m. with a pursuit-format race.

Just two races into the trials, it’s still too early to tell how close the competitors are to qualifying for the Olympic team – athletes’ best three results in the four events are added together to make up the team. There are four spots available for the men and five for the women.

For the men, Bailey is in a strong position because his two combined percent-back scores put him higher than the rest of the field, and he also has the top overall single score from both races. Steer’s percent-back score for Friday’s sprint is the highest of any athlete so far, but she’s in seventh when her sprint and individual points are combined.

Coming off a 15th-place finish Thursday when she racked up 11 penalties over four shooting stages, Steer settled down somewhat Friday to miss one target in each of the two shooting stages in the sprint.

“Everybody knows I had a horrible day yesterday and it was a huge blow to my confidence,” said the 2002 Olympian. “I haven’t been shooting very well at all this year and I’ve really struggled with it.”

While Steer needed to overcome her confidence issues – something she’s still working on, she conceded – Konrad needed to get past something much more critical. During the prone shooting phase, she cross-fired from point 2 into point 1. The penalty for cross-firing is five misses, no matter how many targets the competitor hit.

Konrad finished with seven penalties, so she had to ski hard to make up for it. The 38-year-old was 1:28.80 behind Steer.

“It was absolutely shocking,” she said. “… At that point I thought I was totally out of the race.”

The bad conditions helped Konrad. The 10th Mountain course is fairly easy and fast, according to most of the competitors, so the snow and wind helped slow everyone down.

“That was the only thing that allowed me to make up the time,” she said.

Treacy, a Dartmouth College senior, was 59.5 seconds back. She had one penalty in each shooting stage.

Bailey said he, too, was worried about the weather Friday morning. He was more concerned with bouncing back from his final shooting stage Thursday, in which he had four penalties.

“Yesterday I had some of the classic jitters on the last standing,” he said. “I really lost some of my focus there. Going into the race today my game plan was just to go out there and take the shots … I just stuck to my game plan and fortunately it worked out.”

Burke, who was second in Thursday’s 20K individual, skied into the finish area just ahead of Bailey. Burke, who was 36.5 seconds behind, waited for a minute to hug his teammate.

Like Steer, Teela had to shrug off a disappointing sixth-place finish Thursday. He had just one penalty in the prone stage Friday, but his day was spoiled a bit by four penalties in the standing stage. He was 1:01.03 off Bailey’s time.

“It hit me pretty hard in the standing,” Teela said of the conditions. “I had to make a choice whether or not to shoot or hang around for a while. I thought I was skiing pretty well, so I went for it, missed four and I knew I had to work.”

Yarmouth native Walt Shepard, a MWSC skier who was ninth Thursday, finished fifth Friday. Sara Granroth, who grew up in Yarmouth, was 11th in the women’s sprint.