Four-time Olympic champion Daria Domracheva trained for two and a half years Chinese national biathlon team told about the sport’s unclear international prospects in the Asian country.
Domracheva and Ole Einar Bjoerndalen coached the Chinese national biathlon team from September 2019 to February 2022. At the moment the family lives in Monaco, both coaches are not employed.
– Is Chinese biathlon focusing on domestic tournaments or has it started to pay closer attention to international starts there?
– Hard to say. We are in contact with the athletes, we know that part of the team was to come to the World Cup stage in France. As a result, everything was postponed, the Chinese missed Pokljuka and Ruhpolding. Based on the experience of 2021, we doubt the team will even take part in the World Cup this season. But there is still hope for the World Cup.
– Which Chinese names will declare themselves loud and clear in biathlon in the near future?
— It would be possible to talk about it with confidence if the Chinese team continued a systematic and targeted preparation to participate in all competitions. There are promising athletes in the team, as we have seen this last season by the progression of some of them from race to race. But today many are training without shooting at all, others have been in quarantine for a long time, someone completely misses the competitive season, including even domestic competitions. I don’t know exactly the current realities, but what we see indicates the absence of a clear structure in the national team.
– Who replaced you as coach of the Chinese team?
– According to the guys, a Chinese specialist worked with those who decided to train in the team.
Source : MatchTV
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