By Adele Haeg
At least in the United States, few nordic skiers ever watch or try out biathlon. Many perceive the sport as nordic’s nerdier, even more European cousin, which is surprising given that it involves guns.
According to rising star Luci Anderson, who has one ski in the nordic world and one in the world of biathlon, the two sports are unsurprisingly very similar, as far as training and technique go. However, she explains, the culture of biathlon — the fans, the venues, the history — is very different from that of nordic skiing. Is biathlon the rival sport of nordic? Or is the future of nordic skiing… biathlon?
To start to get some answers to these questions, Nordic Insights recently caught up with Anderson to talk about her past year as a biathlete, which is also the entirety of her career as a biathlete.
Anderson, who is from Golden Valley, Minnesota, skied for Loppet Nordic Racing and Armstrong High School; she finished second at the 2019 state meet, approximately one ski length back of Mara McCollor of Wayzata. Anderson earned a spot on the University of New Hampshire Team, where she spent five years in D-I skiing and was captain of the team her senior year.
In her first year of being a professional athlete, Anderson excelled on the SuperTour and at U.S. Nationals during the 2024/2025 season. She placed first in the 10-kilometer interval-start race at Mount Van Hoevenberg in March and finished as the second and third American, respectively, in the skate sprint and 10km skate at U.S. Nationals in January. Needless to say, Anderson is already a very accomplished cross-country skier.
But that’s not all!
After Anderson graduated from UNH last spring, she joined Team Birkie to continue ski racing. There she was quickly spotted by the U.S. Biathlon Team’s Project X, a program that recruits high-level cross-country skiers to train them for biathlon.
The first time that Anderson ever picked up a rifle was last summer at Project X. And she caught on quickly, as Team Birkie’s announcement of her promotion to the club’s World Team highlights:
“Luci Anderson … posted a remarkable [22nd] place finish for the USA in her maiden FIS Cross Country World Cup. Anderson also competed in her first IBU World Championships and the bulk of the IBU World Cup season, all just months after picking up the sport, solidifying her first nomination to the U.S. Biathlon Team for 2026 as well.”
Anderson, who has skied her entire life, had never trained specifically for biathlon until after she graduated from UNH in spring 2024. She said that her transition to being a professional athlete and her strong initial success were both “awesome and unexpected.”
“I did five years at UNH so I had another like grad year,” Anderson said. “My senior year I was like, I’m so done with skiing. I don’t want to do this really anymore. But my grad year went really well and I was like, You know what, I don’t really want to go get a job yet. I’m going to go join Team Birkie and it’s at home and I’ll go train with them. And then the biathlon opportunity came along too and I was like, Oh, that’s kind of… I can’t really pass that up. That would be super cool. I might as well try it.”
Many nordic skiers’ first question about biathlon is consistently, How do you ski five kilometers at race pace and then slow your heart rate down enough to focus on aiming and shooting a rifle at a very small target some distance away?
Here’s Anderson’s take on that perennial query:
“Well, a lot of practice, of course. You just kind of have to learn how to shoot with your heart rate high and your breathing high. But a lot of people do it.”
Anderson explained that the training for nordic and biathlon is very similar. Of course, with Project X, she’ll tack on biathlon target practice to a two-hour rollerski, but otherwise she can train with Team Birkie in the summer, when she’s not at biathlon camps.
Nordic Insights: “So I’m curious if the training for biathlon is super different. Especially over the summer, what are you doing to hone those biathlon skills? What does that look like?”
Luci Anderson: “It’s mostly all the same. We have the same block system, you know, of like three weeks on one week off that I think most cross-country skiers do. But training is basically the same. When I’m home, I just train with Team Birkie and I don’t do any shooting. But then when I’m at camps with [the U.S. Biathlon team] we do combo workouts. So it’s like you’re skiing and shooting at the same time.”
“Her progress curve was quick,” U.S. Biathlon noted in an article about Anderson, which has made her stand out from other cross-country skier biathletes.
This summer, Anderson traveled with the U.S. Biathlon Team to Bend, Oregon, where she caught up with her U.S. Cross Country Ski Team friends at the on-snow camp in May. Then she went to Livigno and Antholz in the Italian Alps, the site of this year’s Olympic biathlon events (Klæbo was just there too!). She’s often in Lake Placid, home to an Olympic Training Center and a biathlon range.
Anderson has already qualified to race in Period 1 of the FIS World Cup this season, where she is targeting the 10km interval-start skate in Davos. More broadly, she has three specific results goals for the year: “Top 30 at a biathlon World Cup,” she says. “Top 20 at an XC World Cup. Qualifying to race at the Lake Placid World Cup [that ends the 2025/2026 nordic season]. Qualify for the Biathlon Olympic team.”
The U.S. has never won an Olympic biathlon medal in its history, despite sending multiple biathletes to every Games since the sport’s debut in 1960. It remains the only Winter Olympic sport in which the Americans have never medaled. It might be Anderson carrying the torch for the U.S. biathlon team this winter in Milan–Cortina.
“For cross-country I’m not expecting to make an Olympic team but it would be kind of crazy,” Anderson candidly notes. “But then for biathlon we don’t name our World Cup teams until after October. So it’s kind of tricky because I want to try to balance both sports and do cross-country races because it’s been going pretty well for me. I’m hoping to qualify for the Olympics in biathlon.”
There’s even more volatility to biathlon than there is to nordic, given race-day conditions and, especially, the variability inherent in shooting. The Bø brothers or Martin Fourcade notwithstanding, ongoing success like that claimed by Klæbo or Therese Johaug or Jessie Diggins is rare in the sport. Pure ski speed will not win you the race; you have to be an accurate shot, too.
Even if you are good in biathlon, “you’re not just … going out there and like knowing that you’ll win, or like knowing that you’re going to be on the podium,” Anderson explains. “A gust of wind could come and you could miss like a couple targets, and even if you have the fastest ski time on the day, you could still be in 40th place. So there are people who are winning one day and then getting 60th the next. You kind of savor your good races more and it’s also so fun because then it’s like anybody can win almost.”
For Anderson, this is a feature, not a bug.
“It’s almost addicting,” she says, “because at least for me, I would have some pretty fast ski times. So on those [biathlon] World Cups, I would have like a top-30, top-20 ski time, but then be in like the 90s because I shot poorly. But then it’s like, Oh, if next time I hit two more shots, you know, if I just hit all my targets, then I can win.”
This somewhat stochastic aspect of the sport affects its culture, Anderson explains. “Skier people are kind of all similar in a way,” she notes. “But I would say in biathlon… everybody’s a lot more humble.”
Notably, some biathletes are faster than some nordic skiers: they do the same training, but they have to dial in that much more for the shooting.
Here’s Anderson’s take on the longstanding question of who is faster: “A lot of people (me included) — honestly before I started biathlon and really dove into the culture of it I thought, Biathletes are not as fast as cross-country [athletes]. But they are, and they’re even faster. If you put the people who are winning biathlon races in a cross-country event, they would crush. They would win.”
This past season, a biathlete competed in the 10-kilometer skate race in Holmenkollen and bested (an admittedly tired) Klæbo himself for a second-place finish. He’d only raced one World Cup before. Anderson had a comparable experience. Her very first FIS World Cup in Les Rousses, she finished in 22nd place, which is remarkable. It seems that some biathletes can be faster than some nordic skiers at their very own sport.
And not only are they sometimes faster, they can also make more money. Biathlon gets broadcast on Eurovision Sport in Europe, and, Anderson suggests, is more popular in Europe than nordic skiing is. She also said there is more prize money at stake in biathlon.
To illustrate that point with numbers: in 2023/2024, the top male biathlete Johannes Thingnes Bø earned roughly $500,000 in prize money, and that was before the International Biathlon Union approved prize money increases for last winter. Klæbo, by comparison, one of the winningest cross-country skiers in history, won 339,200 CHF last winter in prize money on the FIS World Cup, which is roughly $420,000.
Biathlon is for a huge swath of winter sports enthusiasts far more exciting to watch than nordic skiing. In Europe, they broadcast it live and hike up prize money for World Cups, which is an incentive to race frequently. Especially in Europe, biathlon is beating out nordic for viewers and attention. Luci Anderson will always love cross-country, but she’s still pursuing biathlon for now.
Nordic Insights: “What are some of the reasons you think you’d prefer to stay with biathlon? There’s the prize money for sure. What other factors are there?”
Anderson: “For me at least, I’ve gotten so much support from U.S. Biathlon and I’ve been working with their coach, who I really like. And I’m also just getting so ingrained into the biathlon world that I think it makes me want to stay in it. But I’ll always be doing cross-country things as well. For now I really like biathlon, and my teammates. It’s so fun. We’re a small group, but we have a lot of camps together and train together all the time in the summers, which I think is kind of different from the U.S. ski team. They have a couple camps, but they mostly go and train with their clubs.”
(Unfortunately, any discussion of female athletes’ experience with U.S. Biathlon in 2025 is tempered by star Joanne Firesteel Reid’s exposing last year that the team allegedly turned a blind eye to longstanding physical and cultural abuse. At least a half-dozen additional biathletes came forward after Reid’s story broke, the Associated Press reported.
Anderson’s experience with the team has been a happier one.
“I was personally not on the team during the time that this was happening, so I can not speak on those cultural issues,” she wrote to Nordic Insights. “My experience with USBA has been nothing but positive and I truly believe the organization is taking steps in the right direction to make the team feel as inclusive and respectful as possible. All of my teammates and the staff I have worked with have been very respectful and always making sure I have the same opportunities as the men on the team.”)
Cross-country skiing should be taking notes. The sports can coexist, and they should. Biathlon isn’t going to endanger Nordic skiing anytime soon — that’s not the point. Winter endurance sports can be mainstream (biathlon is in Europe!). Winter endurance sports can be extremely exciting and unpredictable and worth tuning in for (not that nordic isn’t because it usually is, but not everybody does, in Europe or the United States).
Here’s the last word to Anderson, now an enthusiastic apostle for her new sport: “I obviously never want to give up on cross-country as well because that’s also so fun and I know all those people who I have been doing it with my whole life. But so far, biathlon has been really fun. And I’m really loving telling people about it.”
You’re reading this on Nordic Insights, one man’s labor of love dedicated to publicizing American skiing. We started with nothing and now we’re going to the Olympics. You can read more about our first three years here, and donate to the Olympics fund here. Thank you for consideration, and, especially, for reading.
