The Russians are very good at Biathlon, but they’re very bad when it comes to respecting man’s right to keep and bear arms. The sport combines cross-country skiing with target shootings, and it requires Olympians to carry rifles on their backs. While other countries allow them to take their guns back to their hotel rooms, things are a little bit different in Russia.
SOCHI, Russia—The most carefully guarded sporting equipment in the Winter Olympics lies behind the door of a sealed-off corridor in a stadium near the upper reaches of the Caucasus Mountains. It is monitored at all hours by security guards who open the door only for its owners. And even then, they need personalized keys to retrieve it from their lockers. For biathletes, the security measures are just one more reminder: It isn’t easy getting your equipment around the Olympics when your equipment includes a .22-caliber rifle.
There are reasons biathletes like to take their rifles home or back to a hotel. Away from the mountain, many of them hang sheets of paper with five black dots on bedroom or living room walls, which mimics the targets in a race. They use them for a training method called dry firing, in which they aim at the dots with their rifles unloaded and pull the trigger.
Before a typical race day, they can do this casually—before bed the previous night or just after breakfast, for instance. But at the Olympics, the security measures bring those routines to a halt once biathletes step out of the competition venue. “You just kind of adjust your schedule,” said U.S. biathlete Lanny Barnes.
Some biathletes get a little apprehensive about leaving their rifles in the care of strangers, whether it’s at the Olympics or at an airport. While the size of the rifles is standard, the stocks are highly customized to fit biathletes’ bodies. They can cost several thousand dollars, and biathletes tend to keep the same ones for several years. Some even nickname their rifles.
“It’s a sport that requires you to hit something the size of an Oreo cookie at 50 yards while you’re at maximum physical exertion,” Team USA’s Lowell Bailey said. “You need a rifle that fits you absolutely perfectly.”
With their rifles on lockdown at the mountain, there is little for biathletes to worry about. But U.S. biathletes say there have been occasional travel issues. An airline briefly lost their rifles while returning from a race in Geneva in December, delaying their delivery for a week. As a result, some separation anxiety lingers.
“We have a very interesting relationship with our rifles,” Studebaker said. “It always makes us nervous when we’re separated from them.”
Source: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303650204579374813065981026
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Gregory Smith
