With Beijing 2022 just around the corner, Team China is readying itself for an important task: to score as good a result as possible at their home Olympic Winter Games and strengthen the sound foundations for further development of biathlon in a newly-built world-class infrastructure.

When the curtain fell over the Olympic Winter Games PyeongChang 2018 and the season 2017/2018, Chinese biathlon found itself in no man’s land. It felt disconnected from the respectable level, and nobody was coming up the ranks. There was no Chinese man in the BMW IBU World Cup Total Score rankings. Jialin Tang won three points for 38th place in the pursuit of Oestersund, which brought her 96th position in the Total Score rankings. Tang was 66th in the individual and 70th in the sprint in PyeongChang, far from a convincing performance from an athlete who scored a career-high of sixth in the Hochfilzen sprint six seasons before. Worse, China didn’t even have enough athletes to compete in the relay in the BMW IBU World Cup or IBU Cup.

Project Beijing 2022 gets underway

And then the Beijing 2022 project started in the fast lane with just four years available to find enough talented athletes, to structure a team of capable coaches around them, and work as hard as possible.

Norwegian coach Tobias Torgersen moved to Team China from junior Team Sweden, where he curated the skills of such future world-beaters as Elvira Oeberg. In the months after the PyeongChang 2018 Olympic Winter Games, he was presented with what was supposed to be all Chinese biathletes, around 25 men and ten women, and made a selection from them. “A few months later, I evaluated more athletes. I was looking for athletes with high endurance capacity who could join the training group in the summer. The more technical aspects you can coach up if you have time.” 

Torgersen was first joined by the French shooting coach Jean Pierre Amat. In September 2019, biathlon’s golden couple, Ole Einar Bjoerndalen and Darya Domracheva announced that they were taking on the challenge. 

“I was first approached for a coaching job almost two years ago. I thought coaching a team would be an interesting project. I studied and discussed it with many people. I took the sixth or seventh proposal. It wasn’t a snap decision for me. I used to focus just on myself as an athlete; now I need to manage a team of 30 people,” said Bjoerndalen at the BMW IBU World Cup in Hochfilzen two years ago.

“It was helpful to learn about the individual athletes from Tobias and Jean Pierre. But it was also important for Ole Einar and me to dive in and explore for ourselves,” added Domracheva.

Bjoerndalen and Domracheva wanted to be hands-on coaches from the beginning. They spent most of the training on their skis, monitoring skiing technique improvement as they didn’t simply copy-paste Norwegian or Belarus way but looked for a combination that fit the character of the Chinese athletes. “As a Norwegian, I was used to doing things on my own. My Chinese athletes need support all the time,” said Bjoerndalen. “I am combining the knowledge that I have learned from Klaus Siebert and Alfred Eder. Their approach was very systematic,” chipped in Domracheva. 

An essential part of the puzzle was working with the Norwegian Biathlon Association, which assisted in ski preparation.

A promising started to the project and then C-19 struck

China was promisingly underway in the 2018/2019 season. Fanqi Meng’s gold medal in the junior women individual at the IBU YJ World Championships in Brezno-Osrblie 2019 was a highlight, while Tang and Yan Zhang stabilised their performances. A year later, Chinese Relay Men and Mixed Relay finished 18th at the IBU World Championships Antholz-Anterselva 2020. Meng collected her first-ever world cup points for the 38th place in the sprint of Nove Mesto na Morave, and Yuanmeng Chu did the same in the pursuit of Annecy Le Grand Bornand, finishing 32nd.

“The team has developed strongly in areas,” thinks Torgersen. “Especially our shooting level has at times been world-class. Unfortunately, our development hit a big speed bump with the whole pandemic situation. It kept us from participating in international competitions last season. We have a young and inexperienced team that badly needed to race against the best. We climbed steadily up the Nations cup rankings and gained quota places each season we could take part in, in the BMW IBU World Cup.”

In the Olympic 2021/2022 season, China’s form hit an impressive stretch in Oberhof. Fangming Cheng shot 9/10, skied 27th fastest time, and finished 12th in the sprint, a career-best, following his 16th place in the sprint of Nove Mesto na Morave in 2020. China finished 12th in the Mixed Relays and was the best shooting team with just four spare rounds, two less than the winner Norway with the Boe brothers, Marte Olsbu Roeiseland and Ingrid Landmark Tandrevold. In the Single Mixed Relays, China had four reloads and finished tenth. Chu was 28th in the pursuit in Oberhof and even five places higher in the same discipline in Annecy Le Grand Bornand.

“Our main focus is staying safe and not getting infected before the Olympics. From my perspective, I know that some of our athletes and Relay teams could fight for Top 10 places in Beijing 2022. To qualify one athlete for the mass starts would be great, and within our goals,” says an optimistic Torgersen.

Building on significant work and world-class facilities

The National Biathlon Centre, located in Zhangjiakou City in north China's Hebei Province, will stage the biathlon competition during the Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games. It is a world-class venue by recognised standards. Following the Games, the centre will be used by the Chinese national team for training. But China has seen (much) better times in biathlon before. Between the Torino 2006 and Vancouver 2010 Olympics, the Chinese women's relay team finished on the World Cup podium four times. Xianying Liu won a silver medal in the pursuit at the IBU World Championships 2005 in Hochfilzen and finished seventh in the mass start at the Olympic Winter Games Torino 2006. She was on the podium three times in the 2004/2005 season and finished sixth in the Total Standings for the 2004/2005 season.

Yiangchao Kong banked two second-place finishes in the IBU World Cup in the 2004/2005 season and finished very respectable 15th in the Total Score standings in the 2006/2007 season. She was sixth in the mass start at the IBU World Championships Hochfilzen 2005, as was Chinese women relay in Antholz-Anterselva 2007.

“I hope the people in charge can make use of not only the Olympic venue but also some of the other training facilities. They should use the knowledge that some of the staff members have gained wisely. This is a great chance for China to finally have consistency in their biathlon program,” thinks Torgersen.

Photo: IBU/C. Manzoni; IBU archives