Dorothea Wierer, a two-time Total Score winner, multiple World Champion, and Olympic medallist, ended her career with an emotional farewell at the conclusion of two historic weeks for biathlon in Antholz 2026.

For the past eight years or more, Dorothea Wierer claimed she was about to retire, that she has back problems, doesn’t sleep well, and in general thinks there is so much more to life than biathlon, so even not winning a medal at the IBU World Championships Antholz-Anterselva 2020 wouldn’t be so important.

Yet, it was in exactly those last eight years that she became an individual World Champion in the Mass Start at the IBU World Championships Oestersund 2019, won gold medals in the Pursuit and Individual at her hometown World Championships in Antholz-Anterselva, and claimed back-to-back IBU World Cup Total Score titles by squeezing past Lisa Vittozzi in the last week of the 2018/2019 season and past Tiril Eckhoff in the last week of the 2019/2020 winter. She said she didn’t really feel like going to the Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games, but, of course, she still won bronze in the Sprint - a medal that made her career a Hall of Fame one.

Above all, Wierer was fun to be around, a plain-speaking woman with a big heart and a Hollywood smile that made her the most marketable Italian winter athlete for years. Wierer and her long-time teammates Vittozzi, Lukas Hofer, Dominik Windisch — and in the last few seasons Tommaso Giacomel — made biathlon a mainstream sport in football-obsessed Italy, an achievement in itself. She retired after finishing fifth in the Mass Start, the closing act of the wildly successful Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026 for biathlon. That she could do so alongside Franziska Preuss, another biathlon legend, made the last day of her career even more remarkable.