FootyChatter.com

Olympics "America just loves the Olympics so much, " says Campbell Wright, the laid-back, New Zealand-born biathlon medal hopeful. "It's insane how much you guys love the Olympics. " Christian Manzoni / Nordic Focus / Getty Images And then there was one. Over the last century, Americans have won nearly every sort of medal at the Winter Olympics. They have won medals on skis and on skates, on sleds and snowboards, on rinks and in halfpipes, with pucks and with stones. They’ve won medals in every Winter Olympic sport except one. America has some terrific cross-country skiers and some outstanding target shooters, but combine those two disciplines into biathlon and the sport becomes the country’s great, white Winter Olympic whale. Advertisement What will it take to get over the line in Italy come February? It’s a pretty simple sport, according to Lowell Bailey, who represented the U. S. for 15 seasons on the World Cup tour and won a world championship title in 2017. He is now the high-performance director for U. S. Biathlon, the national governing body. “You have to ski fast and shoot accurately, ” Bailey said during a recent interview from a training center in Shelburne, Vermont. True enough, in the case of Team U. S. A. this time around, the timely arrival of an extraordinarily talented New Zealander may be of great assistance as well. Meet Campbell Wright, a Kiwi through and through but with American parents and an American passport. That made him eligible to change his sporting nationality when it became the only viable way for him to become an elite biathlete. It turns out biathlon is even more of a niche sport in New Zealand than in the U. S. Wright joined Team U. S. A. in 2022 after the Beijing Olympics, when he became, at 19 years old, just the second New Zealander to compete in the Olympic biathlon meet. It was the start of a new Olympic quadrennial, when most federations assess and reboot. Three years later, he became the first American to win two medals at a world championships. In this season’s two World Cup events so far, he has six top-10 finishes in eight tries, three in individual races and three in relays. In February, maybe the most laid-back biathlete the sport has ever known just might be the one to snap America’s longest Winter Olympic losing streak. “Everyone says I’m the great white buffalo, but I don’t really believe them, if I’m being honest, ” Wright said during a recent interview from Italy, where he was preparing for the start of the season and lapping up the hype. “America just loves the Olympics so much. It’s insane how much you guys love the Olympics. ” Advertisement Indeed, guilty as charged. Only Norway has won more Winter Olympic medals than the U. S. , which has collected 330 medals since the Winter Games began in 1924. Not too shabby considering only a few of those sports have anything close to the mass participation and cultural resonance in America that they enjoy in European countries. For the uninitiated, Olympic biathlon races range from 7. 5 to 20 kilometers, plus a 24-kilometer relay. Biathletes do loops around a course and take multiple turns shooting at targets between loops. When they miss a target, they have to ski a short penalty lap around an oval before getting back on the course or, in some races, have one minute added to their finishing time for each missed shot. It’s a wild test of endurance, shooting accuracy and the ability to slow the heart rate enough to hit targets with drunk, screaming fans banging cowbells all around. A biathlon race in the heart of Europe or Scandinavia is about as exciting an event as there is in winter sports, a mad party in the snowy woods. It’s worth noting that Deedra Irwin came awfully close to ending the U. S. drought in China in 2022. She missed one target during her final round of shooting in the women’s 15-kilometer individual event. With a clean round, she would have won a medal. She finished seventh. Alas, the puzzle of Olympic biathlon for America has persisted, despite the efforts of Bailey and his cohorts at the national federation to solve it. They have hired some of the sport’s top minds from Europe, expanded participation at the grassroots level by working with ski clubs to introduce their members to shooting, and formed partnerships with universities and equipment makers to stretch the organization’s resources. Researchers at Montana State University provide their expertise in physiology and sports science. The University of Utah helps provide doctors to travel with the team. The organization works with cutting-edge wax manufacturers to make the skis glide faster. Advertisement “We can’t put all our eggs in one basket and hope for more Campbell Wrights at the beginning of every quad, ” said Jack Gierhart, the chief executive officer of U. S. Biathlon. No, they can’t. But Wright arrived nevertheless, a tale of kismet more than a decade in the making. When he was a young boy, Wright’s parents moved from New Zealand’s North Island to the South Island, which he compared to moving from Tennessee to Vermont in terms of climate. They weren’t skiers, but a neighbor was, and she offered to take Campbell and his three siblings skiing on the weekends. His mother jumped at the chance, and Wright got good quickly, entering and winning races without much coaching or technique. Around the age of 15, he realized New Zealand had very little funding to help him become an elite cross-country skier. However, biathlon’s global federation, the International Biathlon Union (IBU), had a program to help develop athletes from non-traditional biathlon countries. Wright (slowly) learned how to shoot and before long was training in Italy with junior athletes from Spain, Brazil and Australia, none of which have anything close to a tradition in biathlon. He loved everything about the sport, even the workouts that sent him into the so-called pain cave, and especially socializing with the other developing skiers. When Wright was 16, Armin Auchentaller, the Italian coach of the U. S. team, traveled to the Italian championships to watch his daughter compete. He saw a boy with an oddball accent come flying up the hill and saying hello to everyone cheering him in the crowd as he passed, a strange sight in biathlon, where athletes are generally deadly serious. “I thought, ‘Who is that? '” Auchentaller said during an interview in November. An Italian coach then mentioned to Auchentaller that Wright was American, even though he was born and raised in New Zealand. Auchentaller sensed an opportunity and made a note to keep an eye on Wright during the next few years. Advertisement As Wright rose through the junior ranks, however, he began to realize that racing for his beloved native country was a dead end. He needed a national team, and New Zealand didn’t have one. America’s biathlon leaders were well aware of that. They decided to pursue a soft-sell strategy. Following the Beijing Olympics, they offered to have Wright travel with and receive coaching from the U. S. team during the 2022-2023 season, even as Wright represented New Zealand. He became the first biathlete from the Southern Hemisphere to win a medal at the junior world championships, a gold in the 10-kilometer sprint. At season’s end, it was clear that the U. S. team represented both salvation from the loneliness of competing solo and the path of least resistance, given the friendships he’d already formed with his soon-to-be teammates. “They’re absolute sterling blokes, the lot of them, ” Wright said. “And the cherry on top is the funding is way better. The wax technicians have way more budget. We get better material. There’s more science going into my training plan. There’s better coaches. It’s honestly just a bit overwhelming how much better it was. ” Wright’s presence had an immediate impact on the team, which feels the collective weight of being America’s lone Winter Olympic sport without an Olympic medal. He is deadly serious about his training and competing, but not particularly serious about life, and he tries not to overcomplicate his sport. “He walks in, like a Kiwi does, and he’s like, ‘All right, mate, what are we doing today? ’” Irwin said of Wright. Teammates ask him for advice on how to focus on the targets, and he says, “I don’t know, man, I just pulled the trigger. ” “He brings that unique kind of young perspective to our team of just like, ‘It’s not that deep, ’” Irwin said. “We’re out here to have fun. It’s not life or death. ” Advertisement Standing in the middle of a mass start at an important race, Wright invariably starts chatting with the people around him. He’s not trying to psych them out or interrupt their pre-race routines; it’s just what he does. Federico Fontana, the team’s head technician, can spend days contemplating the various ways to employ the team’s private stone grinder for each snow condition and obsess over which skis to recommend on the morning of a race. Wright will come over to him, put his arm on his shoulder and tell him to ease up. “He says, ‘Don’t make yourself crazy, you’re going to give me a great ski, ’” Fontana said. In the ideal world, Wright isn’t the only option for ending the drought. Maxime Germain, a French-American who was born in Alaska, has shown promise. Luci Anderson was competing on both the cross-country and biathlon international circuits in recent years. She is now fully committed to biathlon, and her shooting continues to improve. Irwin has been close. If anything, the collection of biathletes that the U. S. will bring to Italy in February will likely represent a kind of shotgun approach to getting that elusive medal. It is the North Star for U. S. Biathlon, the goal that informs every move the organization makes and allows it to turn over every rock in hope of finding an Olympic medal underneath. The team will have athletes exemplifying the roots of the American experiment — that nearly everyone who calls the U. S. their nation is from somewhere else, or their parents and ancestors were. It will have athletes who got hooked on biathlon as kids, and those who are terrific skiers who only recently learned how to shoot. There’s Chloe Levins, who started competing in her mid-teens and also played golf at Middlebury College, where she is now the assistant golf coach in addition to a world-class biathlete. Advertisement One of these years, there will likely be biathletes who were young skiers at their clubs the day a representative of U. S. Biathlon showed up with a laser rifle and offered them a chance to shoot it, which is an essential part of the organization’s strategy moving forward. “We have worked really hard at developing strategies and programs and developing or reinforcing areas of our pipeline towards the idea or the goal of developing sustained competitive excellence, ” Bailey said. “You’re not resting your entire hopes and dreams on one shot during one race. You’re building strength throughout the pipeline. ” They desperately want a medal winner. What they really want is a strong team with multiple medal winners, though for now, one would do. “If you’re doing things right, it shouldn’t just be one athlete that has a chance on a given day, ” Bailey added. “Every athlete on that team having a chance. ” Matthew Futterman is an award-winning, veteran sports journalist and the author of the forthcoming book, "The Cruelest Game: Chasing Greatness in Professional Tennis, " to be published by Doubleday in 2026. He has written two other books, “Running to the Edge: A Band of Misfits and the Guru Who Unlocked the Secrets of Speed” and “Players: How Sports Became a Business. ” Before coming to The Athletic in 2023, he worked for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Star-Ledger of New Jersey and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Follow Matthew on Twitter @mattfutterman