With Few Fans And Little Funding, U.S. Biathlon Team Hopes For First Olympic Medals
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
There's a sport in the Winter Olympics that the U.S. has never won a medal in. That's the biathlon, which is a combination of cross-country skiing and rifle shooting. NPR's Melissa Block spent time with two top U.S. biathletes who are hoping to break that drought this month at the Olympics in South Korea.
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LOWELL BAILEY: Yeah.
MELISSA BLOCK, BYLINE: When Lowell Bailey won gold at the Biathlon World Championships last year, it was a stunning milestone. He became the first ever American world champion.
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UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: (Foreign language spoken) Lowell Bailey.
BLOCK: Bailey's top finish along with a silver for his teammate, Susan Dunklee, raised hopes that this might finally be the U.S. team's Olympic medal year.
L. BAILEY: I've never seen our team in such high spirits. It's palpable.
BLOCK: I meet Bailey on a rare break from the biathlon circuit at his home in New York's Adirondack Mountains. That's where he took his first glides on cross-country skis at age 3.
L. BAILEY: Yeah, I can't remember ever, like (laughter), not being thrilled by being on a pair of skis.
BLOCK: Bailey's 36 now with three Olympics behind him. What's frustrating is that despite the team's recent unprecedented success, biathlon in America is still very much unknown, unappreciated and underfunded.
L. BAILEY: We're still facing budget deficits coming off of our best year ever.
BLOCK: I would think that as an athlete who's devoted his entire life to this, that that would just be totally galling.
L. BAILEY: Yeah, it's - it is galling.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: All right, want to roll?
L. BAILEY: Yeah.
BLOCK: On the day I visit, Bailey grinds through an indoor intensity workout. He'll spend nearly two hours on a treadmill wearing short roller skis, sweating through steep climbs. His heart rate will reach 180 beats per minute, as it will during a race.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: And done. Nice work, Lowell.
BLOCK: Bailey has devoted his life to a sport where Europeans overwhelmingly dominate and money talks. The European teams' budgets dwarf that of the U.S. team. Most European biathletes can count on a government salary, a pension. If they're successful, the government may even give them land. Bailey's wife, Erika, remembers a question he got in Finland last year after he won the world championship.
ERIKA BAILEY: Somebody said, so did Donald Trump give you land?
L. BAILEY: And it wasn't a joke. I have a friend on the women's Finnish team who won world championships, and she was given a plot of land to build a house on.
BLOCK: By contrast, the top U.S. Olympic biathletes will get a stipend of $2,000 a month plus bonuses if they win. Others scrape by however they can.
L. BAILEY: Imagine if you're a doctor and you go to work and don't know whether or not you're going to get a paycheck. That's the life of a U.S. biathlete.
BLOCK: Which means don't bother looking for these athletes on a Wheaties box or in a Coke commercial. Instead, Bailey's teammate, Susan Dunklee, decided to get creative. She was competing in Europe, where biathlon is the most-watched winter sport on television. So she made a sticker and put it on her rifle right in the spot where the TV cameras zoom in.
SUSAN DUNKLEE: And I said, millions of viewers, your ad here.
BLOCK: It worked. She picked up two endorsement deals with overseas companies.
DUNKLEE: All right.
BLOCK: We head out to the biathlon range near Dunklee's home in Craftsbury, Vt. Biathlon requires two totally opposite skills - all-out exertion in cross-country ski racing where you push your body to the limit and then an immediate pivot to relaxed, precise control in the shooting stages. As Dunklee explains, imagine running up 10 flights of stairs as hard as you can and then trying to thread a needle. When I visit in November, there's no snow to ski on, so Dunklee and her teammates run hard through the woods and uphill.
DUNKLEE: OK, I'm approaching the range, trying to take some nice, deep breaths, prepare for shooting.
BLOCK: They'll be shooting .22-caliber rifles, aiming at targets 50 meters away.
DUNKLEE: Bolting. Then I inhale, exhale onto the target and take the shot.
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BLOCK: The key is to slow your heart rate down, steady your hands and calm your nerves.
DUNKLEE: Yeah, that time I had five for five, which is satisfying (laughter).
BLOCK: Susan Dunklee has great endurance genes. Her father was a two-time Olympic cross-country skier. She competed in cross-country in college. When she was recruited for biathlon, the shooting part felt totally alien.
DUNKLEE: I remember going to the shooting range the very first day and loading the magazine and then shooting and smelling gunpowder. It was just a really foreign smell that didn't belong there, you know? And now I never notice it.
BLOCK: But last fall, things changed. The mass shooting in Las Vegas forced her to think about her sport in a new and painful way.
DUNKLEE: I just had this disgust about anything gun-related. And it really took away the joy that I enjoy doing my sport, you know, just thinking about that and the whole gun culture and stuff. And it almost makes me want to just put the rifle down and never touch it again.
BLOCK: Still, her passion for biathlon pulls her back. And to help build the sport she loves, this Olympic athlete spends time coaching little kids in Vermont...
DUNKLEE: Big breath in, big breath out.
BLOCK: ...Hoping to inspire the next generation of biathletes.
DUNKLEE: Relax onto the target.
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BLOCK: Melissa Block...
DUNKLEE: Good.
BLOCK: ...NPR News.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Thanks.
DUNKLEE: Nice job. Sweet. Bring some gloves next time, huh (ph)?
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