International intrigue of biathlon hits County

Wednesday, March 3, 2004

FORT KENT -- Six years ago, Kelsy Bouchard could not have known what lay ahead.

Bouchard, the daughter of a local potato farmer, was about to enter Fort Kent Community High School. Skiing for her meant barreling down hills fast after being pulled up by machine. She took up cross country only because her high school team required its skiers to compete in both Alpine and Nordic disciplines.

Late Tuesday afternoon, Bouchard packed up her biathlon rifle and skate skis after placing fourth among Youth Women in the final event of the U.S. Junior Biathlon Championships, a 7.5-kilometer sprint that served as a dress rehearsal for organizers of the much-anticipated World Cup Biathlon races, which begin this morning and run through Saturday at the 10th Mountain Lodge.

Biathlon combines the demanding physical endurance of cross-country skiing with the exacting finesse of rifle marksmanship. Competitors ski a few kilometers through the woods, then stop in a clearing and get prone to shoot targets the size of half dollars. They resume skiing, then stop again to shoot targets the size of teacups while standing. Miss a target, and you must ski a 150-meter penalty loop.

The sport is popular in Europe, as evidenced by the 26 million viewers expected to watch the Fort Kent event unfold live courtesy of a German public television station. Forty cameras will record every nuance of the races.

The best biathletes hail from cold-weather climates such as those in Norway, France, Germany, Belarus and Russia. This will be the ninth of 10 stops on the World Cup biathlon circuit, sponsored by a German gas company called Ruhrgas, and the first ever held in New England.

"You just have to drive through town now and you can sense something's different," Bouchard said, standing under an overhang of the blockhouse-style wooden lodge to avoid light rain that fell Tuesday afternoon. "There's actually traffic."

The circuit's eighth stop came last week in Lake Placid, N.Y., where roughly 500 spectators turned out to cheer competitors accustomed to European crowds in the tens of thousands. Matters might be different in Fort Kent, however, where area schools pushed back their winter vacations to coincide with this event.

On Sunday afternoon in Presque Isle, when the plane arrived carrying competitors from Lake Placid, nearly 1,000 well-wishers turned out to greet them.

With seed money and continued financial support from the Portland-based Libra Foundation, the Maine Winter Sports Center constructed two world-class biathlon facilities, the 10th Mountain Lodge in Fort Kent and the Nordic Heritage Center in Presque Isle, and threw open their doors to the public, free of charge.

Sports Center staffers worked with local schools and communities to, as their slogan says, "re-establish skiing as a lifestyle in Maine."

Biathletes moved here to train. Parents enrolled their children in free lessons with equipment that costs only $40 a season to rent. Bouchard, who turned 19 last week, caught the initial wave, and has ridden it to Scandinavia once and Europe twice. She will enroll at the University of Vermont in the fall and set aside her rifle to concentrate on academics and cross-country skiing.

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