International Biathlon Union

I have no idea what biathlon means, so that's [laughs] what you're getting into with me." Um, so anyway, we, um, moved the conversation to email and she was really great about just kinda giving me an overview, um, of the sport and some things that are starting to take place this season, and kind of opportunities, um, to learn more about cross-country skiing and biathlon.

Um, and if I had interest, uh, she'd love to talk further, and so, um, we ended up hopping on a Zoom call because there was an opportunity that came up with IBU, which is the International Biathlon Union.

Um, they were hosting an international training development camp for athletes who were either brand new in the sport, such as myself, um, or athletes who have been in the sport for a few years and are continuing to progress, um, to basically come out and ski for a couple days-

Wow

So, like I said, we're qualifying teams, so we're using, like, an internal point system to qualify athletes for World Cups.

Um, but this is also an International Biathlon Union regional event, so we have regional qualifying points here.

So athletes who are looking to compete internationally this season will be getting points to hopefully have, uh, low enough points to be able to compete on various circuits internationally.

All right.

It should never happen, right? But there's a thing in management and a thing in communications and basically it says shit flows downhill, right? So no manager in a suit ever does something that he can get a minion to do or somebody below him in the hierarchy to do.

This should have been stopped at the UEFA level, okay? As soon as October 7th happened, as soon as Israel was declared to have been engaging in genocide by the United Nations, as they did with Russia, UEFA should have stepped in and say, as long as you're involved in this war in Gaza, you are not playing football, okay? Recently, I spoke to the outgoing president of the International Biathlon Union, Ole Dahlin.

And Ole was very strongly against Russia coming back into the sporting fold at all.

There's a lot of people beginning to let them back in now.

Come post-Paralympics Beijing, the sports decide to split off to the respective partner international federations.

So cross-country went to the FIS, the International Ski and Snowboard Federation, and biathlon went to the IBU, the International Biathlon Union.

This made scheduling quite a bit trickier, but they're still not at a place where they can have totally separate fields of individuals.

Like, both sports need all the competitors because, frankly, you know, parasport has less competitors than the non-parasite.

And we have a lot less money.

So budget-wise, like to send a group over to an IBU competition or to an FIS one, people are going to have to pick and choose because there's not enough money in most of these teams' budgets.

And so FIS and IBU have had to play a little bit nice and try to tailor schedules where they don't overlap.

And ideally...