Here are some sports you missed: A weekly roundup

3 weekly sports items in your inbox every Monday. This week: Team USA landed a huge biathlon recruit in the portal, a 110-point blowout, and a surprise skiing W.

Hey all, hopefully you’ve noticed that I’ve been publishing this newsletter more frequently and more consistently. That’s going to continue—and I’ve decided to bring back the weekly Olympic Sports Roundup that I was doing last summer ahead of the Paris games.

I know a lot of you signed up for this newsletter specifically for Olympics coverage, and quite frankly, there aren’t a lot of places online that do a good job of it. So I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to package my Olympics writing without sending thousands of people emails specifically about biathlon. I was going monthly for a bit, but those posts became unwieldy and were too infrequent.

Here’s what you need to know as subscribers:

• This will be dropping into your inbox on Mondays. (I’ll let you know if it’s gonna be on a Tuesday instead.

• I will write about three things in the roundup every week. Some weeks there will be more than three Olympic sports things worth writing about. I’m going to save up the excess Olympic Sports Things Worth Writing About, like a squirrel preparing for the winter, and will deploy them in weeks when not a lot of things happen. So be warned, the things you’re reading about might be from, like two weeks ago.

• I’m trying to come up with a better way to describe this than “Olympic sports roundup,” since some of the sports I write about will not be sports that are in the Olympics. But I don’t like saying “obscure sports” or “weird sports” since that can sound degrading to these great athletes!

• I’m still bad at coming up with titles for things. I would pay money for a person who just told me how to come up with good titles for things.

• If you know about an Olympics Sports Thing I should write about… drop it in the comments! I try my best to monitor all the international sports all the time, but… there are lot of them.

Anyway, here’s Vol. 1.

Surprisingly good American sport of the week: Biathlon

You’d think that Team USA would rack up Olympic medals if they added guns to more Olympic events. We already do pretty well in swimming, what if they added a swim-and-shoot where Katie Ledecky leaps out of the pool and blasts a shotgun a couple of times and hops back in? But that hasn’t proven true in biathlon, one of a few Olympic events where Team USA has never even reached the podium.

At the recent world championships in Switzerland, a new American broke through. Team USA’s Campbell Wright won the silver medal in the 10km sprint, coming second to Norwegian biathlon god Johannes Thingnes Bø. (You knøw I’m not passing up a chance to type one of thøse guys.) The finish times from the sprint are used to determine the start times in the 12.5km pursuit—Bø finished the sprint 28 seconds ahead of Wright, meaning Wright had to make up 28 seconds in the pursuit. (You might wonder: “With this format, doesn’t the winner in the sprint win the pursuit all the time?” Yep! That happens a lot!) Wright almost pulled it off, cutting into Bø’s lead… but ultimately, he couldn’t make up the gap, finishing eight seconds behind Bø.

Clips of both races are in this video—the thumbnail is Wright’s reaction upon clearing his final set of shots in the pursuit and realizing he was good to go for a second silver medal.

Although it’s rare for an American to succeed in biathlon, Wright actually has an even rarer biathlon background. He was born to American parents in New Zealand, and spent the beginning of his career competing for his birth country. He was the only Kiwi biathlete at the 2022 Olympics, and just the second ever. He then won a gold medal at the 2023 junior world championships for New Zealand, the first ever medal at the junior worlds (or the Olympics, or the regular world championships) by an athlete representing the Southern Hemisphere.

Wright’s explanation for the switch is pretty simple. He was pretty much the only New Zealander competing in biathlon, and had been pooling resources with other racers from countries without robust national teams. Then he joined Team USA, which made things easier:

“When I went to the U.S., I was just like, ‘You guys actually have facilities you can stay at for free?’And you have a physio and a gym and a massage and a shooting coach?’ So I was just absolutely blown away by the support that those guys get.”

(Another bonus: A lot of biathlon medals are in relay events. You can’t do those without teammates!)

“I had to swallow a bit of national pride changing, because I think a lot of my identity as a biathlete was being the Kiwi guy,” Wright told Olympics.com. In this cute little video made by the International Biathlon Union, he has to think for a sec when asked his nationality:

And it really seems plausible that Wright can win Team USA’s first biathlon medal—perhaps even a gold one—next year. Bø, the biathlete who won gold over Wright in bøth events, has won the most world championships of any biathlete ever, but he’s retiring in March instead of sticking around for next year’s Ølympics. That øpens things up in Milanø for contenders like Wright.

I feel a little bit like a fan of a blue-blood college basketball program that just landed a mid-major’s best player in the transfer portal. The story of an American biathlete winning a medal is surely less interesting than the story of a Kiwi biathlete winning a medal—but the key to both stories is the “winning a medal” part. And Wright’s best chance to do that is with Team USA.

Skiing weather report: Breezy

You’ll notice that Breezy Johnson doesn’t really celebrate when crossing the finish line in this video of her downhill win at the World Championships. That’s because Johnson was the first skier on the course. Everybody watching presumably thought one of the next 30 racers would post a better time, considering Johnson had never won at the World Championships… or at the Olympics… or at any other notable race in eight seasons of competition.

But Breezy’s time held up. The win was the first American victory in the downhill since Lindsay Vonn in 2009. Johnson also teamed up with Mikaela Shiffrin to win the first-ever gold medal in the new team combined event, which will make its Olympic debut in Milan next year. Johnson had the fourth-best time in the downhill portion, Shiffrin had the third-best time in the slalom, and that was good enough for gold.

Breezy’s career has been filled with injuries, and she missed the 2023 season and most of the 2024 season due to a suspension for whereabouts failures—basically, athletes must be available for drug testing 365 days per year and can be penalized for missing availabilities even if they have valid excuses, and Johnson missed three of her availabilities, leading to a 14-month ban despite “a relatively low degree of fault” and never actually testing positive for anything.

But even when healthy, Breezy hadn’t won a lot. Johnson had never finished top 5 at an Olympics or World Championship, and had never won one of the many World Cup races held each year. In the run-ups to the World Champs, she’d finished 13th, 11th, 22nd, and 4th—and now she’s a two-time World Champion!

We’ll see whether this was a brilliant blip for Breezy, or whether she’s a legit medal contender heading into next year’s games.

It’s my job to show you international sports ass-kickings

I vow to you that I will scour the world of international sports to bring the biggest routs, whoopings, beatings, and clobberings to your inbox. Here’s a rugby match: Georgia 110, Switzerland 0.

The win is believed to be the fifth-largest in men’s international rugby history and the third-largest shutout. The record still belongs to Australia’s 142-0 win over Namibia

The matchup happened because of a strange format. The Swiss won the 2023-24 Rugby Europe International Trophy, the third tier of competition, and earned promotion to the Championship, the second tier. Georgia has won the Championship seven years in a row and has won 16 of 22 all-time, but there’s no promotion out of the second tier. The competition for the best teams in Europe, the Six Nations, aren’t adding new members. My late Irish father-in-law had a good rant about how Georgia probably had a better claim to being the sixth nation in the Six Nations than serial last-place finisher Italy, but it was easier to sell away trips to Rome to fans and players than trips to Tbilisi.

Georgia is basically a Quad-A baseball team, not quite good enough for the majors but nothing more to do than beat up the unfortunate opponents on their schedule. The Lelos are well on its way to another championship. Meanwhile, Switzerland has since lost to Netherlands 73-0. A couple more matches and they’re gonna be rethinking the whole neutrality thing.