2024-2025 Total Score Winner and Olympic Mixed Relay Bronze medalist Franziska Preuss has announced this afternoon via social media that she will be retiring with the conclusion of the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026.

Few athletes have seen the highs and lows of a biathlon career as pronounced as Germany's Preuss. The 2024-2025 Total Score Winner has announced that the Women Mass Start in Milano Cortina will be the final competition of her career.

Preuss has had a challenging Olympic Games, struggling in the standing shooting, but no matter what happens, she will walk away from Milano Cortina 2026 with at the minimum, the Bronze medal she shares with her teammates.

Auspicious Start to Career

After Saturday’s Women’s Mass Start, Preuss will hang up her rifle, skiing off into retirement, closing out a career that started spectacularly when she won three Gold and a Silver medal at the 2012 Youth Olympic Games.

From that auspicious start, Preuss’ career was one of high expectations that led to some great successes while held back from legendary status by frequent injuries and extended illness. Until her recent illness and hand surgery this fall, Preuss always fought back, but at age 31, her struggles this season became the writing on the wall.

Although she never won an individual IBU Junior World Championship, her talent was such that a year after taking two Bronze medals at those championships in Obertilliach, she was named to Germany’s Olympic Team for Sochi 2014 at age 19. It was probably a bit early. Although was in two World Cup Flower Ceremonies, she struggled on the range at the Laura Biathlon Stadium, with 40th in the Sprint the highlight of her first OWG.

Kontiolahti Silver Medal

One year later, Preuss fulfilled her promise, stunning the big stars in the IBU WCH Mass Start, battling with a 19-out-of-20 shooting day to win the Silver medal. She later added a solid second leg for the Gold-medal winning German relay squad.

It took Preuss four more years before she finally stood atop a World Cup podium. Ironically, it was the same place as her first-ever World Cup podium at home in Ruhpolding, winning the Mass Start by a hair over Ingrid Landmark Tandrevold. In the 2015 Ruhpolding Mass Start; four years later adding her first-ever win in the same competition, both in her home Chiemgau Arena.

Over the next few seasons, won multiple IBU WCH medals in relays but no more individual medals. She missed the last trimester of the 2016-17 season with persistent illness. She bounced back, making it to the 2018 Olympic Winter Games where despite shooting clean finished fourth in the 15 km Individual behind Bronze medalist teammate Laura Dahlmeier.

2020/21 Breakthrough Season

In the 2019/20 season, Preuss added two more World Cup podiums, consistently finishing in the top 10, finishing sixth in the Total Score. The 2020/21 season found Preuss on the World Cup podium four times, but still with just a single career victory. She was extremely consistent in a season filled with top tens, finally seeming ready for a big breakthrough after as career-best 3rd in the Total Score.

After that superb season, the Ruhpolding resident struggled with illness and injuries, limiting her results. The 2023/24 season started promisingly with two podiums in Oestersund that put her briefly in the Yellow Bib. She remained in the podium mix until the IBU WCH, where the German star ended her season prematurely to deal with health issues.

In her Instagram post today, she admitted, “I had to endure some setbacks and yet I always fought my way back, this journey had made me the athlete that is proudly retiring from the world of biathlon.”

Dominating Franzi

That is exactly what happened after stepping away in 2024, she returned with a vengeance, a new dominating Franzi. Last season, Preuss was a marvel of consistency. She won five times including a coveted IBU World Championship Pursuit Gold medal plus Sprint Silver and Relay and Mixed Relay Bronze. For once, her body never abandoned her, but she made sacrifices. “I was super strict during a season. I didn’t meet people inside, wore a mask, had Christmas outside with family, a lot of small little things finally paid off.”

They paid off big time. Wearing Yellow, she battled down to the final day for the Total Score title with Lou Jeanmonnot. An unfortunate fall by Jeanmonnot coming into the stadium for the Mass Start finish ceded the title to Preuss. That win may have symbolised Preuss’ career.

“I did so much for this”

She explained that day, “It feels a little bit unreal. It was really an emotional time after the finish…It is hard to celebrate, because it is not the way I wanted to win, that she crashed even if it was not my fault or not. I wanted to have the fight on the last meters before the finish. But a big dream came true!”

As for the importance of the big Crystal Globe to the teary-eyed 31-year-old veteran, “It means a lot to me. I did so much for this and be separated from all my family, especially during the winter…really hard.”

Preuss left Oslo with the Total Score Globe, two discipline Globes and maybe the promised career fulfilled.

Photos: IBU/Vianney Thibaut, Ola Wizor, Nordic Focus