The summer biathlon season got underway in June with the races at the charming venue in Frassinoro, Italy. It’s a nearly entirely under the radar event that of course attracts a fair number of Italian athletes. However, it also draws a strong contingent of American athletes every year. This season it was even more special as we had a few Slovakian, Slovenian, and Canadian athletes join in as well!
Frassinoro, if you aren’t familiar with it, is a beautiful little mountainside venue. The loop is about 1km with a little five person shooting range. It absolutely looks like a family friendly day in the sun. Kids are running around and cheering. Athletes have a lot of interaction with the fans. And best of all the day ends with a pretty nice little party. In fact as the racing comes to a close you can see some of the athletes who are done for the day relaxing with a drink in hand. It looks like it would be a great way to spend a weekend in June!
This year we had qualifier duals to start off the event. It was really about setting up the groups for the mass start tournament to start. There were three rounds: quarterfinals, semis, and finals.
| Women’s Final | Men’s Final |
| 🥇 Pascale Paradis 🇨🇦 | 🥇 Campbell Wright 🇺🇸 |
| 🥈 Anastasiya Kuzmina 🇸🇰 | 🥈 Jakov Fak 🇸🇮 |
| 🥉 Anamarija Lampic 🇸🇮 | 🥉 Tommaso Giacomel 🇮🇹 |
| 4) Martina Trabucchi 🇮🇹 | 4) Danielle Cappellari 🇮🇹 |
| 5) Rebecca Passler 🇮🇹 | 5) Jake Brown 🇺🇸 |
Ultimately it was a just wonderfully fun day of racing! Though significantly outnumbered the small Slovakian and Slovenian contingents made a lot of noise throughout the day. And of course having two North Americans on top at the end, including young Canadian Pascale Paradis, was thrilling. The finals in particular featured two excellent races.
The Men’s final was a battle between the seemingly ageless Jakov Fak and young dynamo Campbell Wright. Fak held a narrow lead on Wright as they came to the last shoot as he had just a single miss on the day compared to Campbell Wright’s two. Ultimately though that small lead wasn’t enough. Fak went 4/5 in the final shooting while Wright went clean. Wright surged away and stayed away for the win. Fak meanwhile did enough to comfortably hold off crowd (and announcer!) favorite Tommaso Giacomel. Seriously you should have heard the on site announcer every time Giacomel did something fun. The way his name rolled off of his tongue you could tell how much he was loving it! Danielle Cappellari and Jake Brown rounded up the finalists.
If the Men’s final was fun, the Women’s final was the icing on the cake of an amazing day. There was some confusion early in the race as I believe Rebecca Passler cross fired on Pascale Paradis’ targets. As a result Paradis fell way behind. She was granted a 20 second time bonus to account for the delay but at the time the audience was not aware. We just knew that Paradis was well back of the lead group. Meanwhile Anamarija Lampic was building a solid lead based on her shooting(!) over Anastasiya Kuzmina.
As all of that was going on Pascale Paradis was methodically moving her way back into the race with consistent clean shooting. By the final shooting she was just behind Lampic and Kuzmina who continued to lead. Paradis once again went clean. Kuzmina had a miss and Lampic had a couple of misses. Paradis came alongside Kuzmina as she came off the penalty loop while Lampic was well back. Paradis and Kuzmina battled each other every step of the final lap while Lampic was making a huge comeback attempt. In the end Kuzmina crossed the line just ahead of Paradis with Anamarija Lampic just 2 seconds further back. With the 20 second time bonus granted from the cross firing that put Pascale Paradis on top of the podium!
Overall there aren’t big things to take away from this race. But it was fun! Seeing Lampic go clean so deep into the race was awesome! Pascale Paradis on top of a podium including a three time Olympic gold medalist is incredible. Anastasiya Kuzmina at 40 years old still battling with these much younger athletes! Campbell Wright taking the top spot over Jakov Fak and Tommaso Giacomel!
Really it’s just fun to see an event like this take place in June. More purely fun events with top biathletes going head to head in the summer would be amazing. It will be great to look back later this season to see if there were any early signs from this race!