Biathlon
Biathlon has been an official Olympic Sport since the Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley in 1960. The word has Latin and Greek roots and means “dual competition”. A biathlon competition is thus the combination of the two disciplines: cross-country skiing and rifle marksmanship.
The predecessor of modern biathlon was the military patrol competition which was held as a demonstration sport at the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch/Germany. It has since developed into the most popularly watched winter sport in Germany. The first biathlon club in Germany “SG Dynamo Zinnwald” was founded in 1956 in the small town of Altenberg south of Dresden in the Erzgebirge mountains.
German, English and Russian are now the three official languages of the sport.
John Gould, Minnesota Biathlon Coach, invites you to explore the sport of biathlon with the additional dimension of the German language. John was a guest coach in biathlon in Germany from 1995 to 1997 and has returned to Altenberg with an athlete exchange in the summer of 2010. He is seeking to find biathletes of all ages who would be interested in seriously pursuing biathlon and eventually getting involved in an exchange with their German counterparts.
The predecessor of modern biathlon was the military patrol competition which was held as a demonstration sport at the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch/Germany. It has since developed into the most popularly watched winter sport in Germany. The first biathlon club in Germany “SG Dynamo Zinnwald” was founded in 1956 in the small town of Altenberg south of Dresden in the Erzgebirge mountains.
German, English and Russian are now the three official languages of the sport.
John Gould, Minnesota Biathlon Coach, invites you to explore the sport of biathlon with the additional dimension of the German language. John was a guest coach in biathlon in Germany from 1995 to 1997 and has returned to Altenberg with an athlete exchange in the summer of 2010. He is seeking to find biathletes of all ages who would be interested in seriously pursuing biathlon and eventually getting involved in an exchange with their German counterparts.