ANTERSELVA, Italy — Behold the biathlon relay.
It’s one of the glory events of any Winter Games, at least for those countries in central Europe and Scandinavia where biathlon is second only to soccer in popularity, and of course for anyone lucky enough to participate in it.
With snow pelting the Anterselva Biathlon Arena in Antholz on Tuesday amid the rising peaks of the Dolomites that form a 360-degree panorama around the stadium, 80 men powered through four cross-country legs of 7.5 kilometers each, with two rounds of target shooting after each of the first two, 2.5-kilometer laps.
This race and the cross-country relay are in winter what the swimming and track relays are in the summer — chances to gain four years’ worth of massive national bragging rights in heated rivalries. When it was over for the men on Tuesday, France had knocked off the mighty Norwegians by 9.8 seconds in a race decided in the final round of shooting. Some 20,000 delirious, singing spectators with flags of every sort in various states of inebriation had gotten their money’s worth, and then some.
The women got their fair shot at this stage on Wednesday for their relay.
Well, sort of.
The women’s relay consists of four 6-kilometer legs, 1.5 kilometers less than the men. Later this week, the mass start event for the men will be 15km; for the women, 12.5km.
If that sounds strange, it should. The Olympics often regale themselves these days as a symbol of equality.
Sports have to have an equal number of events for men and women, or they are in big trouble. Witness the seemingly inevitable demise of the ski jumping/cross-country skiing duathlon of Nordic combined. The women have never had a Nordic combined event because participation is relatively small, and it would basically be a competition among Norwegians. As a result, the men’s event, one of the original Olympic competitions, appears to be on the chopping block after this edition of the Winter Games.
When logistics allow, mixed team events are very in vogue. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) loves to tout its now near-equal gender participation figures. Kirsty Coventry of Zimbabwe just became the first female president of the IOC.
In cross-country skiing, men and women are competing across equal distances at these Olympics. (Erick W. Rasco / Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)
And yet, in multiple sports at the Winter Games, an explicit message of women as weaker remains.
Skiing’s world governing body, FIS, equalized its distances for cross-country three years ago in a highly touted and much-applauded decision. At the time, Pierre Mignerey, the veteran cross-country race director for FIS, called it “very logical and meaningful decision.”
“The fact that this decision was so much discussed and named as a ‘historical decision’ shows that this move was long overdue,” he said in an article on the organization’s website. “In 2022, we should not have to discuss anymore if women are capable of racing the same distances, having the same rules and using the same courses as men.”
However, women ski through fewer gates in slalom and giant slalom than men do. The vertical drop for women’s speed races, including the downhill, one of the marquee events of the Games, is smaller than it is for men.
All of this begs an obvious question: Are the Olympics a hallmark of equality, or a vehicle for last-generation thinking — or is it two generations ago?
It was 1984 when women were finally allowed to run an Olympic marathon. It was 2020 when women were finally allowed to swim a 1,500-meter race in an Olympic pool like the men always had.
Not wanting to appear heavy-handed in either direction, the IOC generally tries to dodge these discussions and did so again last week.
“The sports rules are obviously for the international federations to develop,” said Mark Adams, the IOC’s chief spokesman. “Usually working with the athletes and teams based on current practice.”
It’s the sort of stance that can have its own pitfalls, tolerating a status quo that reinforces old stereotypes about women just not being able to tolerate the same levels of exertion that men can.
Meanwhile, over at biathlon, which combines Nordic skiing and riflery, women ski a shorter distance in every event, not just the relay and mass start. The individual event is 20 kilometers for men and 15 for women. The sprint is 10 kilometers for men and 7.5 for women. Only in the mixed relay do the women and men — two on each team — ski the same 6-kilometer distance.
Max Cobb, the general secretary of biathlon’s world governing body, the International Biathlon Union (IBU), isn’t debating whether women are strong enough to cover the distances. Of course they are.
In Alpine skiing, slalom courses for women’s skiers have fewer gates than for the men. Speed-race runs are shorter for the women, as well. (Mattia Ozbot / Getty Images)
He said the shorter distances are meant to have women racing for a similar amount of time as the men. That maintains a consistent ratio between the time biathletes spend shooting and the time they spend skiing. If women ski as long as the men do and don’t do it as quickly, that ratio gets out of whack and overemphasizes skiing for the women and not for the men.
He called that balance between the two activities “fundamental to the sport.”
Except one thing — women are skiing a lot faster than they used to. The ratio is shifting.
“It’s something we’re going to have to keep an eye on,” Cobb said. “Maybe we will have to tweak the distances or make some other adjustments at some point.”
Still, ask around the women’s biathlon mixed zone about how they feel about skiing shorter distances than the men, and plenty of women are just fine with that.
“I think it’s more equal (with men skiing longer distances),” Karoline Offigstad Knotten of Norway said last week.
Deedra Irwin, who has the best Olympic showing of any female American biathlete, said she doesn’t agree with equal distances for men and women either. She thinks men can handle more training volume, and longer racing distances for women would require them to train too hard and cause more injuries.
“We already are racing so much every weekend,” she said. “I think it’s cool how much we’re able to race in biathlon because we are racing distances that I think are fair to women’s ability levels.”
This is where it gets a little confusing. Women compete at the same distances in running and swimming and other endurance sports, including triathlon, and do so now in cross-country skiing.
Jessie Diggins, the cross-country star who supported her sport’s move to equalize the distances, spends most of the summer training with men, doing the same workouts.
When FIS voted three years ago to equalize cross-country distances, 57 percent of delegates favored the move, while 36 percent opposed it and the rest abstained. The move was widely seen as a healthy shift toward equality, though according to reports on the vote at the time, Russia, Italy, and Austria opposed the change while the U.S., Sweden, and Finland were among those nations that supported it.
There were questions about how women racing for longer periods might affect television coverage. The women’s longest cross-country race used to be 30 kilometers.
At the Nordic World Ski Championships last year, it took the women about 30 minutes longer to complete the 50-kilometer race than the men, whose winning time was just under two hours. People kept watching the race. The sun rose the next day. The women will race 50 kilometers in cross-country at the Olympics this weekend for the first time.
The equality movement doesn’t appear to be spreading at FIS, though.
Bruno Sassi, the chief spokesman for FIS, said the different course specifications at the Olympics and on the World Cup in Alpine skiing have to do with how “each slope is certified for defined vertical drops, lengths, and gradients, and these parameters automatically determine the course layout and number of gates. They are therefore not discretionary choices, but the direct result of the homologation standards for each category.”
In other words, the courses are not equal because the certification standards they have to meet are not equal. It’s all a bit circular.
The effects of that are pretty stark. For example, it took the men about 110 seconds to complete their downhill. The women took 96.
It’s possible the perfect person to ask about all this is Luci Anderson, the 25-year-old American who raced in cross-country in college as recently as 2024 before switching to biathlon.
“I think it would be really cool to have the women do a 20 km individual start,” Anderson said last week, referring to the longer men’s distance. “It’d be really hard, but the men do it. How hard can it be?”
Anderson said she has zero doubt women can do what the men do, and the sport will be just fine.
“We can definitely do it all like men can do our races, we can do theirs,” she said. “It’d be cool to share their experience.”