Johannes Boe knocked out all the medals – Newspaper Kommersant No. 31 (7476) of 20.02.2023

The main hero of the biathlon world championship that ended in Oberhof, Germany, which took place without the Russian team suspended from international competitions, was the Norwegian Johannes Boe. He won medals in all the championship races in which he participated, and only on the final weekend missed the chance to leave the tournament without giving up gold in any of them.

Thanks to the 29-year-old Norwegian athlete, this World Championship will go down in history as an extremely extraordinary event, in fact, unprecedented. Biathlon is a kind, as you know, quite specific in the sense that in it, unlike, say, ski racing, even the highest class does not always guarantee success: circumstances, external factors, and one extra mistake interfere in the alignment every now and then, sometimes, leaves the undisputed favorite without another gold. Therefore, examples of absolute or almost absolute dominance at top tournaments are rare, like real frosts on European tracks. All more or less unconditional ones belong to the times already long ago, for the new generation of biathlon fans – just ancient. In the 1980s, without exception, the gold of the world championships was taken by athletes representing already non-existent countries – the USSR and the GDR, Valery Medvedtsev and Frank-Peter Rech, in 2002 the Norwegian Ole Einar Bjoerndalen repeated the trick at the Olympics in Salt Lake City. But there is an important nuance. At the turn of the millennium, the biathlon program was still very modest in size. Medvedtsev and Rech, in order to collect a complete set of gold medals, needed to win three races each (including two personal ones), Bjoerndalen four (three personal ones). In the modern era, after the program has grown to once unimaginable proportions, equaling the scale of the ski program, dominance could only be relative, even in the performance of such grandiose biathletes as the same Ole Einar Bjoerndalen, Frenchman Martin Fourcade or Belarusian Daria Domracheva .

And so Johannes Boe almost threw into the dustbin the axiom that, no matter how colossal talent you have, no matter how chic you are, you can’t collect all seven gold medals at stake at the World Championships for nothing. Before the final weekend of the Oberhof championship, he was terribly close to the record.

Everyone, of course, was ready for the fact that Boe would collect prizes in bundles in Germany, given his outstanding results in the World Cup. But still, what happened was like a miracle. In a week, Be performed in five races, and each brought him gold. Among them were two team teams – a classic, for four, a mixed relay and a mixed single paired with Marte Ulsbu-Røiseland, as well as three in which partners and partners did not help him and he had to win alone. And the flair of Johannes Boe’s series was added by a small nuance. From the point of view of shooting from these races, he had only one flawless performance – the pursuit, in which he hit all 20 targets. In the rest – relay, sprint, individual – he made mistakes and gave his opponents chances. In the individual race, it was not even a chance, but a chance, because Boe earned a two-minute penalty. For a “normal” biathlete, such shooting is, in fact, a sentence that forces you to forget not only about the first place, but about the podium in general. But the Norwegian was so superior to his competitors, including competitors of titled, famous ones, such as compatriot Sturla Holm Legrade, Swede Sebastian Samuelsson, Frenchman Quentin Fillon Maillet, in speed, that for these moments he did not care.

Johannes Boe, however, still failed to give a fantastic golden series: the last two races prevented him. On Saturday, in the men’s relay race, it was rather the same insidious circumstances that played against him – a powerful wind that turned the shooting into a lottery. The French in her lucky tickets pulled out more often than the more frisky Norwegians, and by the fourth stage, which got Boe, they already had too much stock so that the favorites could count on something more than silver. And in the Sunday mass start, Johannes Boe lost on his own, first of all, it seems, because of the accumulated fatigue. Three misses would not have been catastrophic for him with the freshness of a week ago, but now they have allowed him to finish only with bronze behind two Swedes – shooting cleanly Samuelsson and overcoming two penalty loops Martin Ponsiluoma.

Meanwhile, the seventh Oberhof medal brought the total number of world championship awards that Johannes Boe, who started collecting them back in 2015, already has to 31 medals. According to this indicator, he has already jumped Martin Fourcade, and now there is no one in front of him except the great compatriot Ole Einar Bjoerndalen. He has 45 medals.

Alexey Dospekhov