The great winner of the Biathlon World Cup

Loading player

For the Norwegian Johannes Thingnes Bø the Biathlon World Championships in Oberhof, Germany, ended slightly worse of how they had started: after five golds, in the last two races of the weekend he scored solo one silver and one bronze. Nonetheless, his World Cup was obviously a success. He has won, alone or in relay, all the golds of Norway, first national team in the final medal table; and only by counting his medals would he have finished second in front of countries with a great tradition such as Sweden and France.

Thanks to a clear superiority on skis and ever better results on the shooting range, some speak of Bø – winner of four gold medals at the last Winter Olympics – as the best biathlete ever, certainly close to the level of compatriot Ole Einar Bjørndalen, the most successful ever, capable of finishing first even in cross-country skiing, and of the Frenchman Martin Fourcade, Bø’s former rival emblematically nicknamed “Monsieur Le Biathlon”.

Bø is not even thirty years old and made his debut in 2013 in the World Cup, the seasonal competition previously won by his brother Tarjei. He won the first race in December of that same year and finished the rookie season in third place in the general classification, which was won, like all those from 2012 to 2018, by Martin Fourcade.

Bø won his first World Cup in 2019, then repeated it in the following two seasons. In the 2019-2020 season he won it with 913 points, two more than Fourcade, so far the greatest rival of his career, despite the fact that in January he had missed two stages for the birth of his first child.

With four golds and a bronze, he was the most successful athlete of the event at the last Winter Olympics. Up to that moment his season had been good, but worse than the previous ones, and after the Olympics he had decided to take a break by skipping the last few races.

Interviewed a few months ago by the IBU – the International Biathlon Union – he said that in 2020, after Fourcade’s retirement, he had struggled to find new stimuli. Speaking of his break after the Olympics, he said that he needed to take a break from a sport that in previous years had always kept his mind occupied, and that while resting, seeing the races from another point by sight, he had rediscovered his passion for the biathlon.

At the end of 2022, when the current season began, Bø returned even stronger: always dominant on skis and often quite effective even in shooting from the range. This season he has won, often solo, almost every race he has entered. Except for the first race of the season, he has never finished beyond third place.

At the World Championships in Oberhof, in Thuringia, in central Germany, Bø took part in all possible races: the four individual races, the men’s relay, the medley relay and the mixed pairs race. The only individual race that she did not win (thus not reaching a record that neither Bjørndalen and Fourcade did) was the last one, the mass start race over 15 kilometers, where did three errors out of twenty shots at the range (against zero by the winner, the Swede Sebastian Samuelsson). Silver instead came in the men’s relay, won by the French team.

After the World Cup – in which Italy won gold in the women’s relay, in an exciting and emblematic race of how well Italian biathlon is growing – the World Cup season will continue in early March in Nové Město na Moravě, in Czech Republic, to then conclude at the end of the month between Ostersund, Sweden and Holmenkollen, Norway. Bø, who comes from eight consecutive victories, is obviously in first place with over a thousand points: more than two hundred ahead of the second and almost double the third.

Interviewed a few days ago by Giorgio Capodaglio of Italy fundBjørndalen («the one who broke practically every biathlon record») he said of him: «He will certainly beat every possible record», also defining him as a biathlete «from another planet».

– Read also: The moments of the polygon, in the biathlon