Over four days, we published 37 posts, generating nearly 16 million views across Facebook and Instagram. The content ranged from athlete emotions to 360° footage, partner activations, and even drawings by local children.

Interestingly, the top-performing video wasn’t a medal finish, but raw emotions from young athlete Ilona Plecháčová – perfectly reflecting our strategy: focus on stories, emotions, and atmosphere, not just results.

National Federations can use home events (or season peaks) to scale up their content teams and fully leverage bigger fan attention. The key is to go beyond results and focus on storytelling, emotions, and atmosphere – creating the feeling: “I want to be there.”

This campaign was a natural extension of our season-long strategy: using athletes and short, easy-to-follow reels to make biathlon more understandable, fun and accessible, especially for people discovering the sport during Milano Cortina 2026.

Compared with the average of the other months in the season, February generated around 4.3 times more views/impressions and 2.7 times more interactions across the three channels, showing a clear uplift during the Olympic campaign period.

Similar initiatives can be replicated by other NFs with strong planning and a clear understanding of the audience they want to reach. The key is to prepare content formats in advance, especially for periods when major sport events bring extra attention and new fans. NFs should base the concept on research and performance data, so the content answers real audience needs and is not only promotional, but also useful, educational, and engaging.

Our Biathlon Behind the Scenes campaign was targeted at the "casual" winter sports fans, and Olympic fans that tune in during the Olympic season, but might not know what biathlon is. The fun, light-hearted content captures attention and interest before introducing the sport through more "informational" race footage.

Behind the Scenes posts saw over 3 million views and over 170k engagements on Instagram & Facebook - an overall increase of ~200% from 2024/2025. We also put a lot of effort towards growing TikTok, which focused almost entirely on the entertaining/engaging content and saw over 196k views and over 17k engagements over the course of the season - up from just 5.2k views and 169 engagements in 2024/2025.

I received around 3 million views over the period of my sweater series. As well as roughly 40,000 followers. My handle @aadamrunnalls has now become a knitting challenge with a strong following. I also had a strong following around my sauna hat content. Other athletes have already joined me and had success with a knitting series. Example Maxime [Germain]. The join between knitting and Nordic sport is strong, and fans like the space these two things overlap in. Other athletes just need to post about a project and connect it to their training and sport.

Hobby-Horseing is more popular in Australia than biathlon, and most Australians don't even know what biathlon is. So I made a video that pointed out that disparity and introduced people into the world of biathlon.

@Bestanish on Instagram has 9900+ followers and rakes in a few hundred thousand views per month.

Having any sort of beef with any sport usually attracts attention, and I think that any athlete-driven beef between sports can easily be created by anyone. All it takes is a video introducing the competition, a follow-up saying that we will beat them, and a continued series that plots biathlon against another sports.

The videos were designed for both existing fans and people discovering the sport for the first time. By combining the perspective of an active athlete with accessible explanations, the series aimed to make biathlon easier to understand, more engaging to follow, and ultimately attract new audiences to the sport.

As an international athlete, I have a unique opportunity to explain what happens behind the scenes and make complex aspects of the sport easier to understand.

The submitted content consistently achieved strong engagement throughout the season. Most videos generated more than 10,000 views, with the highest-performing biathlon-specific video (no trend) reaching over 78,000 views.