Master of Maps

The final race day of the season is here already. Where did these three months go to? Oh, how it sucks that the season is so short and the off-season so long in this sport.

Anyway, my favourite discipline, mass start, has the honour to bring even this season to an end. The women will be running yet again on the 2.5 km loop while the men are using this 3 km loop (or 2.8 km track according to my measurements). The course design in Canmore is rather interesting in the sense that the 3 km loop has a section that is not used in any other track, the longer tracks included. It makes the downhill after the climb near the shooting range longer, but otherwise it does not add much to the 2.5 km track besides the curiosity.

If yesterday I complained about too easy 2.5 km loop in Canmore, today in men's 10 km sprint, the 3.3 km loop is a lot tougher, or at least it has a tough section in it.

The course features a kilometre long downhill which has almost 50 metres of height difference and some speedy curves. After the downhill, the athletes have to climb all these metres back up in two almost consecutive uphills with the combined length of around 800 metres. It truly is a pity that the hills that Canmore Nordic Centre has are not in better use and that almost all of the tracks are made on the flat stadium area.

The final weekend kicks off with Women's 7.5 km sprint, and the course looks like this. After a couple of weeks with tougher courses, this week the height differences of the shorter tracks are quite non-existing. The toughest uphill is the one that climbs from the western side of the shooting range. It is a short but rather steep climb. Otherwise, there is not much hill to climb.

It is time for the World Cup finale (sob), and this time the finale is held in yet another Olympic venue, Canmore. Canmore hosted the biathlon events in 1988 Calgary Olympics. Since then, a lot has changed. Apparently even the shooting range has been relocated after the Olympics.

Some significant changes have been made even in the past few years. The last time Canmore hosted the World Cup was in 2019, and since then both the stadium and the course arrangements have been redesigned. The most significant change is that the stadium has become U-shaped. Tracks will no longer go behind the stands for another short loop in the forests before coming to the shooting range. In addition, the penalty loop has changed its placing. However, no new tracks have been built to the forest. The race tracks are just redesigned to make more sense.

As today the athletes will be using the same tracks as in previous days, I have prepared some extra Sunday treat for you. Here are the overviews of the 2002 Olympic tracks in Soldier Hollow.

The courses were rather difficult to track down as there was very little material online to work on and the little I found had terrible quality. In addition, another layer of challenge came from the fact that back in 2002, it was very common to use A and B tracks in biathlon, and the length of the used tracks was not set in stone. So, I had to find double the amount of tracks compared to usual. Besides, some of the 4.0 km B track goes through golf courses nowadays, which made it virtually impossible to track down the exact location of the 2002 course from the modern satellite imagery. I had to try to georeference the poor material I had and digitize that to somewhat of a line.

But here's the end product of all my detective work. I hope you appreciate it to some degree. Thanks to Graphic News for the poor quality thumbnail of a track map (https://www.graphicnews.com/en/pages/13310/olympics-2002-biathlon) and the persons who have uploaded the 2002 Olympic biathlon broadcasts to YouTube!

I still want to mention which courses were used in which races.

Women's individual: 3 km A, 3 km B, 3 km A, 3 km B, 3 km A

Men's individual: 4 km A, 4 km B, 4 km A, 4 km B, 4 km A

Men's sprint: 3 km A, 4 km B, 3 km A

Women's sprint: 2.5 km A, 3 km B, 2.5 km A

Men's pursuit: 2.5 km A, 2.5 km A, 2.5 km A, 2.5 km A, 2.75 km B

Women's pursuit: 2 km A, 2 km B, 2 km A, 2 km B, 2 km A

Today we have women's relay and men's sprint in the program. Here are the courses for today's races. The first climb in all of the Soldier Hollow's tracks is the same climb that was used back in 2002, and there is some Olympic spirit in its difficulty.

As you can see especially from the course profile of the 3.3 km track, the climb is long, although it has a couple of short downhill sections cutting it. Besides, once one has climbed to the top of the hill, they still must have the strength to keep pushing on the flat for a while before the long downhill.

The last, rather short, climb to the second intermediate time before the stadium was added to the courses for the 2019 World Cup. In the Olympics, it was just a smooth downhill all the way back to the stadium.

Soldier Hollow's weekend will kick off with men's relay and women's sprint, both of which will be run using the 2.5 km loop. It's not an easy one. The stadium is in even higher altitude than Antholz, and the track is definitely tougher than the one in Antholz. Apparently also the snow is different in the Rocky Mountains than in Europe, which could turn out to be a challenge for the waxing teams.

Biathlon World Cup is back to the 2002 Winter Olympics stadium in Midway, Utah. The last time world cup circuit visited this old olympic stadium was in 2019. Back then, the courses looked like this. I haven't managed to find any material of the courses that will be used this week, so they remain a mystery for now. As Soldier Hollow has a complete maze of skiing tracks going up and down the hills, it is very possible that the courses have been changed at least somehow for this year.

In 2002 olympic games, the courses were built very differently, as you can see from these snapshots from YouTube. They made loops in the west side of the stadium and not so much on the south side as they did in 2019. The stadium arrangements have not changed much since 2002, though. We'll see, how the courses will look this week.

Finally we get to see the Holmenkollen 1.5 kilometre track in action! It adds a little climb in Chapel Climb before heading back to Gratishaugen, and it's a heavily too long course. A middle lap is about 1.8 kilometres long, not to mention the final lap when they have to climb and go behind the shooting range. Phew. Unfortunately, there is not much choice for the course masters, if one wishes the 1.5 km track to have more than one uphill and the fans in Chapel Climb to see the athletes in single mixed relay.

Back in the days, in the Nordic Ski World Championships in 2011, the 1.5 km sprint track turned directly to downhill from the stadium and made some extra metres on top of the shooting range. That 1.5 km loop had more accurately the right length than this one, but in biathlon this kind of a loop is not possible, because the shooting range must be used as well. Here is a map of the sprint tracks used in 2011, courtesy of the WCH organizers.

One option to do the 1.5 km track otherwise would be to use the extra section of the track that 4 km loop has in the beginning of the course, but that would make the course completely invisible for the fans in Kapellskogen.

It's mass start day!

Men will use the same 3 km loop as women in their individual, but women will be using this 2.5 km loop. It doesn't differ much from the 3 km loop. It just lacks the end part of the first climb and the downhill following it.

So, a new try today on women's individual. Let's hope that the weather gods are in more in our favor today.

Today is also time for the final individual (individual, the discipline) race of the season. As it is men's individual, here is a sneak-peek to today's 4 km course. Compared to the women's 3 km course, this course has two extra parts.

The first one is right in the beginning of the course, and it is a short but rather steep uphill followed by a similar downhill before the long climb to the highest point of the course. It is like a second Gratishaugen Climb but without the ecstatic fans.

The second extra part is basically a flat section on top of the longest climb of the track. It is not especially difficult part in itself, but it might be difficult to have the energy to keep pushing on the flat after the exhausting uphill. This might be the place to make or lose seconds on the last loops.

Unfortunately, neither one of these extra parts of the course are visible for a tv viewer, as there are no cameras filming these sections in biathlon races. Here is, however, some footage of these segments of the track screen captured from a men's 50 km cross-country race in 2014. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Am0KJyIvBsI)

These two images are from the first uphill of the 4 km loop...

The opening event of Holmenkollen World Cup is women's 15 km individual. It's run using the 3 km loop. It's not an easy one - probably one of the toughest 3 km courses in the World Cup circuit when it comes to the amount of climbing. Just look at the course profile. The first third of the course is pure uphill with no rest at all.

This week the Biathlon World Cup enters Holmenkollen, which normally hosts the World Cup finals.

Holmenkollen stadium got renovated back in 2008-2010 for the 2011 Nordic Ski Word Championships and has remained relatively unchanged since then. You might say that once you do things right the first time, you don't have to fix anything later.

Here is an overview of the courses in the Biathlon World Championships 2016. No changes to them has been made since, except that this year single mixed relay will be competed for the first time in Holmenkollen, meaning that there is a new 1.5 kilometre track. More of it later.