Odd one out: Cool Kiwi’s biathlon battle
‘I should come last’, says the New Zealander making his mark on one of the world’s most brutal endurance races and inadvertently irritating its elite. By Joseph Pearson.
On the start line preparing for one of the world’s most brutal endurance sports, there is one noticeably relaxed figure.
With tens of thousands of fans drawn to another punishing biathlon race in the heart of Europe’s mountains, dozens of the planet’s fittest athletes are ready for their latest lung-burning marathon with rifles slung over their shoulders.
The mood is tense. Biathletes have to combine the gruelling slog of cross-country skiing with the precision skill of rifle shooting, lowering their heart rate from its skipping highs while trying to steady cold, shaking hands to hit a target 50m away.
One miss can end their race in a heartbeat. In some events, each miss is another 150m penalty lap on the course. The more you miss, the more you suffer.
The field is dominated by Europeans – Norway, France and Germany are the best in class – with a smattering from Asia and North America.
As the camera dots along the start line, announcing each competitor, most barely flinch. They are seriously unmoved.
However, there is an outlier in an all-black racing suit and a distinct silver fern, gently bobbing his head up-and-down and from side-to-side.
Nobody locked into their skis is more relaxed than him. He chats away with a smile and waves awkwardly as the camera moves by. The odd one out.
He is Campbell Wright, the 20-year-old from Wā naka who, by his own admission, ‘‘should come last’’.
But he doesn’t. In fact, he finished as high as 15th on the World Cup circuit this year and raced at February’s Winter Olympics as the only biathlete from the southern hemisphere.
Wright, who became New Zealand’s second Olympic biathlete after Sarah Murphy at the 2010 Vancouver Games, and his team were thrilled with his Olympic debut in Beijing, as he finished 32nd in the individual 20km and was only two missed targets away from a top-16 finish.
In many sports, coming 32nd is not applauded with much vigour, but biathlon is a different game in which its elite athletes don’t peak until their late 20s or early 30s.
Wright’s talent indicates his best years are to come. At the 2020 Youth Olympics, he finished fourth and sixth in two events and has been quietly developing while training near Wā naka, or in Europe and North America.
Biathlon is considered one of sport’s most difficult endurance disciplines because of the need to drop your heart rate in between stints of enormous anaerobic exertion.
Races can shatter the world’s best competitors, leaving them physically ruined in a broken heap on the finish line. The emotional toll is sapping.
‘‘It’s pretty rough getting to the shooting range and having your heart rate up,’’ Wright says. ‘‘But, if you do it enough times, it becomes easier.
‘‘Imagine you’re doing a running race, then at the end, you’re completely gassed and have to thread a needle. And your hands are cold as well.’’
One of Wright’s coaches at the Snow Farm for the Wā naka Biathlon Club, ex-British biathlete Jason Sklenar, says it’s amazing what Wright has already achieved.
‘‘When you look at the resources the other teams have – and the culture, with a bigger net cast over more kids in Europe – and here, you’ve got little old Wā naka, and this guy that’s emerged and is a phenomenal talent,’’ Sklenar says.
‘‘Who is this kid? I did the sport for nearly 18 years and only made the top-30 twice.’’
Some, bewildered by Wright’s relaxed state before and after racing, are irritated by his success when he rocks up.
‘‘It’s pretty hit-and-miss. French people really don’t like it when I beat them,’’ Wright says.
‘‘Fair enough, because I probably shouldn’t be beating them.’’
He spends only a few months of the year at home for New Zealand’s short winter and trains in Italy and the United States.
Sunday News visited the Snow Farm this winter where he learned the sport as a teenager, starting with cross-country skiing. It’s located high above the Cardrona Valley at the end of a long gravel road that winds towards the peaks, which hide a biathlon course.
On the horizon, the fenced trails where Wright learned to ski and shoot disappear into the hills.
The tracks are carved for classes of kids and adults while Wright whizzes past, barely making a sound but for the crisp strikes of his skis chiselling into thin layers of snow. The crosscountry skiing courses are excellent, but he says the shooting range ‘‘is a bit dusty’’.
Ranges throughout Europe and the US are high-tech with electric targets which reset themselves after each round. The Snow Farm’s range is modest. The targets are reset by a long, hanging rope that droops in the snow.
Biathlon’s origins are in hunting with roots in
Scandinavia and China and military units engaged with the sport while patrolling borders a few centuries ago. It was first included at the Winter Olympics in 1924 in Chamonix, France, and has long been demilitarised.
Biathletes today have smaller rifles – .22 calibre rifles with fiveround clips that weigh about 3.5kg – to shoot laid down or stood up, with specially designed crosscountry skis to maximise speed.
The sport is hugely popular in continental Europe and attracts massive crowds for lucrative World Cup events hosted by the governing body, the International Biathlon Union (IBU), which funnels money to athletes and the national federations, such as Biathlon New Zealand (BNZ).
Something unique is how biathletes don’t peak until they’re much older.
‘‘You have to build your body, your lungs and your heart. That gets better with age,’’ Wright says.
‘‘Also, with the shooting aspect, the older you are, the lower your heart rate is.’’
Wright says his heart rate is about 190bpm when he switches to shooting. Older biathletes drop to about 170bpm.
‘‘It’s a big difference,’’ he says. ‘‘If you miss a few targets in my sport, you’re out.’’
At times, he found his first World Cup season tough and finished well down the field because of a huge jump last year from junior to senior competitions.
BNZ chairman Tim David, an ex-biathlete who represented Great Britain at the 1988 Nagano Winter Olympics in Japan, says Wright’s results have still been outstanding.
‘Imagine you’re doing a running race, then at the end, you’re completely gassed and have to thread a needle. And your hands are cold as well.’ CAMPBELL WRIGHT
READ MORE
Snow sports, once considered the preserve of an adventurous few, are becoming a big deal in New Zealand. This is the fifth part of a Stuff series in which Joseph Pearson reports from Wānaka on a winter revolution. To read the other parts, go to stuff.co.nz
‘‘The international community were aware of him as the novelty New Zealander,’’ David says.
‘‘It should have taken him another [Olympic] cycle to get there.
‘‘And he’s so chilled.’’
Wright gets a mixed reception from fellow competitors. He says half happily offer help.
‘‘I am shooting in the dark, being from New Zealand,’’ he says.
‘‘But the other half look at me and are like: ‘what are you doing here, man?’
‘‘That goes on, but I’m not a serious guy. I’m always chatting and laughing, making jokes and stuff.
‘‘That’s not really well received with some countries, but oh well.’’
Wright says ‘‘there were 20 million things he had never done’’ when he first trained in the
United States, such as lactate testing.
‘‘They look at me like I’m joking, and I’m like ‘no, I race against a bunch of 15-year-olds in New Zealand’.’’
In Lake Placid, Vermont, he trains with the American team and is a popular figure, his Italian coach Emil Bormetti says.
Bormetti first met a 14-year-old Wright when he was with another coach who has been an enormous influence on his career, Luca Bormolini, who was the first to spot Wright’s potential and told him to shoot.
‘‘When Campbell is around, there is a different energy. Of course, he’s unusual, because he’s the only Kiwi, but he’s also a strong one. That makes him even cooler,’’ Bormetti says.