USA TODAY International Edition
U. S. biathletes make mark at championships
Dunklee, Bailey collect medals, spark momentum
Three years ago, biathlete Susan Dunklee watched as Lowell Bailey got his first World Cup podium. A week later, she did the same.
So when she watched Bailey win gold Thursday in the World Championships, she could only hope to repeat history.
Her silver added to the Americans’ drought- breaking competition in Hochfilzen, Austria, giving the program momentum as it heads into an Olympic year.
“I think part of it was just seeing Lowell break that ground and feeding off that positive momentum that the team gets,” Dunklee said.
Bailey won the men’s 20- kilometer race, making him the first American to win a biathlon world championship. The sport was the only Winter Olympics discipline in which the USA had not won an Olympic or world title, a drought that dated to 1958 for world titles and to 1960 for the Olympics.
A day later, Dunklee took silver in the women’s 12.5- kilometer mass start, making her the first American woman to win an individual medal.
They became the first athletes to qualify for the U. S. Olympic team.
For Bailey, it was a reward in a career that he hadn’t planned to continue this season. Last year, the veteran biathlete planned to retire after the world championships. He and his wife, Erika, had loan papers waiting to be signed to start a grass- fed cattle business on her parents’ farm in Upstate New York.
But Bailey, 35, got a call from Crosscut Mountain Sports Center in Bozeman, Mont., seeking help fundraising to build a facility. “That was an out- of- the- blue call that changed our lives,” Bailey said.
Bailey saw coaching as one of the few paths forward after retirement, but the opportunity to work with the center altered his course. It meant he had to keep competing, so he and Erika decided they would travel together with their now 8- month- old daughter, Ophelia, rather than spend six months apart.
In the 20K race, Bailey shot clean in the competition and crested the final climb with about 800 meters to go when he could hear one voice rise above the crowd. It was Erika, who was carrying Ophelia on her chest, shouting that he was winning.
“It’s logistically challenging,” Bailey said. “It’s financially challenging, but I’m 100% sure that that’s the reason I was able to do what I did at world champs. Having Erika and Ophelia there was really everything to me, because I feel like they’re the reason … that I work as hard as I did and they inspire me to do that.”
For Dunklee, the medal came after a fast- shooting race in which she was the first one off the mat in each round. On the final lap, German Laura Dahlmeier caught Dunklee to become the first athlete to win five gold medals in a biathlon world championship.
“I just felt in such a special zone that race compared to a lot of other races where I’ve felt a little more emotionally detached and not so worried about results, just focused on the process of what I was doing,” Dunklee said. “It was just magic.”
While that’s sinking in, the Americans are preparing for a World Cup event in Pyeongchang, South Korea, that will serve as a test event for the 2018 Olympics.
“We look at all these big powerhouses, and they seem to have some special ability that we don’t or there’s something in the water, all that sort of stuff,” Dunklee said. “I think sometimes it takes a little extra belief. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be doing that. It certainly gives us a lot of confidence.”