Translated material
Two-wire Norwegian
Bjoerndalen won the World Cup with two penalty minutes
Unlike the women's 15 km individual race that took place on Wednesday, the first men's start of the season in Ostersund, Sweden, did not bring any awards to the Russian team. Nevertheless, the performance of our biathletes turned out to be quite worthy. Having shot without misses on all four shooting ranges, Ivan Tcherezov finished with the sixth time, behind the stage winner, the unsurpassed Ole Einar Bjoerndalen, the German Andreas Birnbacher, his compatriot third prize-winner Mikael Greis, the Czech Michal Schlesinger and another Norwegian Halvard Hannewold.The Russians generally showed good physical shape. Maxim Chudov and Dmitry Yaroshenko managed to enter the top 15 with two misfires; Sergei Rozhkov was prevented from doing so by three mistakes. That is, everything seems to be in order with running readiness, all that remains is to hone your shooting. The same Rozhkov, uncharacteristically, missed twice when shooting from a prone position. Most of the world biathlon leaders went to the distance with initial starting numbers - from first to twentieth. World Cup winner Norwegian Ole Einar Bjoerndalen and his national team partner Stian Ekoff chose to run at the very end of the entry list, that is, already under three-digit numbers. After all, the day before, when the track froze slightly during the women's race, the girls who left for the start later than the rest showed pretty good results.
The multiple Olympic champion passed the first milestone as the leader of the intermediate protocol, but he was let down by the firing from the stance - two bullets into the milk. It seemed to many that at that moment the Norwegian had lost all chances not only of winning, but also of winning a prize place in general. Not so! Bjoerndalen raced along the track at full speed and, having shot at the last line, was 18 seconds behind Birnbacher. On Wednesday, Irina Malgina was able to gain a dozen seconds from the Norwegian Eikeland on the last lap, but she was a Russian, and the great biathlete of our time turned out to be capable of more. At the finish line he was ahead of Birnbacher by almost a quarter of a minute - that's more than 30 seconds. on a four-kilometer stretch! Note that the Frenchman Raphael Poiret, with the same shooting accuracy as Bjoerndalen, lost to the winner by 1.40 and remained in seventh place.
Tcherezov, by the way, became one of four biathletes who, following the results of this race, entered a kind of “Zero Club”. Besides Ivan, only Birnbacher, Austrian Friedrich Pinter (tenth place) and Frenchman Ferrol Cannar (12th position) showed perfect shooting.
A unique result for competitions of this level was shown by the outsider of yesterday's race, Hungarian Karol Gombos - 19 penalty minutes. That is, the Magyars hit only one target out of twenty attempts. True, such a weak performance is not at all an anti-World Cup record, but only a repetition. In the 2001/02 season, the representative of Moldova, Ivan Buksa, by the way, a veteran of the Afghan war while still in the Soviet troops, also missed 19 times in the individual race in Slovenian Poklujka, but at the same time managed to show not the very last result, ahead of some Bosnian who was barely walking on the ski track.