Translated material
We ran, caught our breath...
The pursuit is an event in which athletes reap the benefits of what they did two days earlier in the sprint distance. They start from the positions they are trying to achieve there. From this point of view, it is not difficult to guess that all our hopes for a medal were connected with the women's race, and in particular Anna Bulygina, who took fourth place in the sprint with a second behind the third prize-winner Marie Dorin from France. They were separated by 13 seconds from our former compatriot and now citizen of Slovakia Anastasia Kuzmina, who sensationally won last Sunday at the shortest distance in classical biathlon. A gap that can be easily recovered.
Then the layout at the start looked like this. Olga Zaitseva started the second fight (25 seconds behind Kuzmina), third - Svetlana Sleptsova (48 seconds), fourth - Olga Medvedtseva (more than a minute behind). As for the fight for the championship title, the spring of intrigue was twisted to the limit: Kuzmina and the famous German Magdalena Neuner left the start almost simultaneously, with an interval of one second. Naturally, we were rooting for Anastasia, but her chances of repeating her success began to fade after the second shooting range, where, unlike Neuner, she made one mistake. And besides, the German woman ran faster. By the second prone stage, her advantage over Kuzmina was already 25 seconds, and when both made one shot in the milk there, it became clear that this time the rivals would change places on the podium.
Alas, Bulygina’s run did not go well, who, despite only one miss, not only failed to cling to the bronze medal, but also dropped from fourth position to sixth. Then, in the mixed zone, the head coach of the Russian national team, Vladimir Barnashov, will say that Anna herself gave the Frenchwoman Marie Brunet the bronze medal. “It was in vain that she began to resist from the very first meters of the distance in the hope of winning back her 13 seconds. lagging behind the leaders,” he lamented. - You see that you are not catching up, there is no need to catch a bird in the sky, you had to fight for a real place. And not to make such childish mistakes as Bulygina had at the second firing line - she couldn’t empty the clip, fired two blank shots and ended up staying at that line for too long.”
Olga Medvedtseva managed to rise from 22nd place to 20th, being the only one in our four who managed to improve her result. But this, of course, is very little consolation. As for the men's race, we must admit, hand on heart, that our guys had no chance of getting on the podium. They ran, caught their breath, and then it was good before the next races, in which we continue to expect medals from them.