When your brother is the best in the world

Simon Fourcade is a silver medalist from the IBU World Championships. He has nine podiums to his name in the BMW IBU World Cup and finished 5th in Total Score in the 2011/2012 season as a career-best. He is also the older brother of the great Martin Fourcade, one of the best winter athletes in history. He knows how it feels to be the second-best athlete in the family. And it wasn't easy for Simon to accept that the younger brother got better talent than him.

You happen to be the older brother of one of the best biathletes and winter athletes of all time. Easy or not easy?

It is never easy to be the older sibling and lose to your younger brother or sister. The feelings are mixed. Of course, you are happy about your younger brother’s success. On the other hand, as a top athlete, you want to be the one that is the more successful. In the beginning, it was not easy to accept that my younger brother was more talented and more successful than me.

When did you first sense that Martin is going to be more successful?

There is four and half years difference between my brother and me, and I stayed ahead of Martin until I was 24, maybe 25 years old. I traveled to the Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver in 2010 as the leader in the Total Score standing. Martin joined the team as clearly a very talented but young athlete. He was supposed to just taste the Olympic feeling. I hoped for at least one medal in Vancouver. I wanted to shine in Canada. I thus put a lot of pressure on myself and performed disastrously. Martin won a silver in the mass start. That was a very difficult moment for me. In the end, it was my brother that shone and not me. I was happy for Martin but deeply disappointed for myself.

How did you cope with that?

Following two years, I was only obsessed with being better than Martin. I kept comparing myself to him, tried to be better than him, but it never really happened again. In that period, there was tangible tension in our relationship. Imagine, as a biathlete you live together almost 300 days a year. You eat together, train together and fight for the same trophies. It is a very intense time. We had some tough moments, especially during family gatherings, like during Christmas time. We didn’t really like each other's company. 

When did you accept the fact that he will always be better than you and moved on?

I started to be myself only in 2012, and it turned out to be my best season in the world cup. There was a moment in our wax cabin before the sprint at the world championships in Ruhpolding in 2012, when Martin said one sentence to me - I will never tell you what - that cleared the air between us and triggered something in me. I was suddenly aware that as much as he learned from me from a young age as I was the one who picked the career of an elite sportsman in a family with no background in competitive sport, I can now learn from him. I stopped comparing myself to him and focused on fulfilling my potential again and just being the best version of myself. I had to put my ego aside and accept that Martin could be better and already is better than me. I could also see that in fact, he was better than anybody, that he is perhaps the best winter athlete of all time. And that he started biathlon because of me, that I opened the doors for him. Since then we have a very sound relationship.

Have you talked to other people about your feelings in the period when you struggled?

I did. I talked to many other people, many older brothers, not just from sport, but from all sorts of industries, who had a similar experience. And we agreed that younger siblings often look up to the older ones and see the way that has already been discovered. And then goes deeper and further on the same path.

We all know that Martin has always worked very hard but that he also has this incredible capability to push his body very hard for longer periods of time. So some advantage was perhaps his better genetics for biathlon?

Absolutely! Genetics play an important role, not just in sports, but also in more intellectually heavy careers. What is difficult to accept is that you come from the same genetic pool, but the other sibling got the better mix for the same profession. Our family moved to the mountains from sea level when Martin was still a very young boy. And with the change of the environment, his body adopted naturally by transforming oxygen through the blood to the muscles with far greater efficiency than this is the case with most people. Plus, he grew up with me and for him being in a competitive environment was something common, nothing special. So he started wining early on and continued to do until the end of his career.

Now, Elvira and Hanna Oeberg are the talk of this season. We all know how accomplished biathlete Hanna is. She is an Olympic and world champion after all. But Elvira’s performance this season, with just 22, is quite mind-blowing. Try to be as objective as you can be, and please tell us how do you see the rivalry between sisters who are great friends.

Elvira is showing stronger performance on a day-to-day basis at 22 than Hanna did. She is an immensely powerful athlete. Hanna is also a very complete biathlete, an Olympic and World Champion. They have different body build; Elvira seems stronger in the legs and Hanna is a more slender athlete. They use a different set of qualities to fulfill their potential. Only the future will tell who will turn out the greater champion. But an athlete like Elvira rarely comes around.

Photo: IBU; C. Manzoni