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• A high school league combines shooting and nordic skiing in a paintball version of the sport
Photos by Joe Kline / The Bulletin
Mountain View's Cameron Eberitzsch takes aim at a line of targets while participating in the biathlon paintball competition during an Oregon Interscholastic Ski Racing Association district event at Walt Haring Sno-park in Chemult on Saturday. Eberitzsch placed 16th in the boys event.
Photos by Joe Kline / The Bulletin
Maia Watkins of South Eugene High School aims at a line of targets while participating in the biathlon paintball event during an Oregon Interscholastic Ski Racing Association district competition at Walt Haring Sno-park in Chemult on Saturday
 Joe Kline / The Bulletin
North Eugene’s Rheanna Williams skis to the shooting area during the OISRA paintball biathlon race Saturday. Participants alternated loops of cross-country skiing with shooting paintball guns at targets during the association’s second annual biathlon ever.
CHEMULT —
Guns are not a common sight at high school nordic ski races.
But there they were Saturday at Walt Haring Sno-park, at an Oregon Interscholastic Ski Racing Association Southern League meet.
Don't be alarmed — the guns were not actual firearms. Rather, they were paintball guns, being used for the league's second annual paintball biathlon.
“That's the main point, is fun,” Mountain View High coach Eric Martin said Saturday as the staccato pop-pop-pop of paintball guns firing filled the afternoon's chilly winter air during the event. “Biathlon in Europe is huge. I mean, it's like the No. 1 sport in a lot of countries, and it's really fun to watch.”
But Saturday's races also served as exposure to a sport in which opportunities are scarce in Oregon.
In biathlon, participants alternate cross-country skiing with rifle shooting. The sport is governed at the international level by the International Biathlon Union, has its own World Cup circuit and world championships, and is contested every quadrennium in the Winter Olympics.
Though it does not rank highly in the United States sports hierarchy, biathlon enjoys a popular following in Europe, as Martin mentioned.
In standard biathlon, competitors ski courses of designated lengths and shoot at several rounds of targets at designated intervals. Using .22-caliber rifles that they must carry the entire race, biathletes from standing and prone positions take aim at targets located 50 meters away. Competitors who miss targets must traverse one or more penalty laps — depending on the number of misses — before heading back out onto the trail, or they incur a time penalty, depending on the race format. After all that, the racer with the fastest time wins.
“The lead changes constantly,” Martin said of elite biathlon. A “guy will come in, and he can go from first to 10th just by missing.”
Saturday's OISRA biathlon was staged after the day's individual races, and a total of more than 80 kids from close to 10 different high schools — including local schools Mountain View, Summit, Bend High and Central Christian — participated. The biathlon took the place of the standard relay and did not factor into league standings.
It also departed a bit from the usual biathlon format. Beginning 30 seconds apart, after skiing a short starting stretch, competitors entered the shooting area, which included six stations. The targets — rather than the self-indicating targets commonly used at the elite level — were white panels of wood mounted on pieces of plywood, with five round black targets painted on each panel. Adult volunteers manned the shooting stations to assist the skiers with the paintball guns, which always remained at the stations. Volunteers also tabulated the number of hits and misses participants recorded in their three target rounds. (A shot was considered a “hit” if 50 percent or more of the paintball splatter landed inside the black circle.) Additional volunteers cleaned off the targets by applying soap and water.
After the first round of shooting, the participants alternated two 1-kilometer loops with two more rounds of shooting and then concluded the race by skiing a short distance to the finish line.
Rather than incur penalties for missed targets, participants earned a 10-second deduction for each target hit. Mountain View skier Sam King won the boys race, and Ashland High's Alexandra Kiesling was the girls race winner.
Trevor Merrifield has raced in the OISRA biathlon the past two seasons and took fifth in the boys event Saturday. His participation has whetted his appetite for more.
“I think it'd be really fun to try it with an actual biathlon rifle and carry it and have a full-length race,” said Merrifield, a South Eugene High School junior, moments after finishing the biathlon.
For many, if not all of the teenagers present Saturday, the OISRA biathlon is an introduction to a sport that has limited participation options in Oregon. Internet search results yield no active biathlon clubs in the state, though the Oregon National Guard does sponsor a team. And the Bend-based Mt. Bachelor Sports Education Foundation also introduces youths to the sport. Also on Saturday, MBSEF staged its third annual biathlon — similar in format to the OISRA biathlon — for its Stevenson Youth Program cross-country skiers (ages 7 through 11).
Washington boasts the Washington Biathlon Association, and a number of biathlon races are staged across the state each year.
Whether any of the kids racing Saturday take up biathlon remains to be seen, but what was certain was that plenty of them were enjoying themselves.
“It's a lot of fun and there's not a lot of pressure on it,” Mountain View junior Raeann Morelli said. “So you can just go out and have a good time.”
But who knows what will come out of this casual, low-key introduction?
“Maybe a kid here,” said Martin, “can get the bug.”
— Reporter: 541-383-0393,
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More information
For results from Saturday's OISRA biathlon races, see Community Sports Scoreboard.
To learn more about biathlon, go to biathlon.teamusa.org and www.biathlonworld.com.
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