Lisa Vittozzi will make us passionate about Biathlon

The twenty-nine year old from Sappada won the World Cup and is now aiming for the home Olympics.

Biathlon is a simple and cruel sport. It’s simple because it has some easy rules, which anyone can understand in a short time. As the name suggests, it consists of two sports in one: cross-country skiing and rifle shooting. Practically you go around the track and shoot five targets, four times, and then the last lap takes place to the finish line. It’s cruel because every mistake with the rifle corresponds to a penalty, which changes depending on the competition format, but which is generally quite heavy and often consists of an extra 150m lap to complete for each mistake made. Shooting well, therefore, becomes at least as essential as being strong on skis. Lisa Vittozzi knows this well.

There are four specialties – sprint, individual, pursuit and mass start – plus relays. In the individual and the sprint you start alone and arrive alone. They are to all intents and purposes races that in cycling would be called “time trials”. The only difference between the two is that one is twice as long as the other. In the pursuit, whoever won the sprint or individual starts first, then the others follow suit, each with the gap accumulated in the previous race. In the mass start, everyone starts together and only the top 25 in the general ranking are entitled to participate, plus the five best of that stage. All specialties award points for the general ranking but they also have their own specialty ranking.

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Every year, elite athletes compete in two competitions: the World Cup – in stages, which marks the season from late autumn to the end of winter – and the World Cup, which lasts two weeks and interrupts the season, before the final decisive stages. Which is more important? It’s hard to say. Let’s say that at the World Championship there is only one race and usually the strongest wins, especially if they manage to get to those two weeks in top shape. In the World Cup, however, whoever manages to have the most triumphs continuity of results throughout the season and in the different specialties. Lisa Vittozzi also knows this well.

In fact, his season ended with three silvers (pursuit, mass start and mixed relay) and a gold (in the individual, his specialty) at the world championship in Nove Mesto – and with victorylast weekend, of the overall World Cup ranking, as well as those of two specialties: pursuit and individual. No Italian man or woman had ever succeeded.

Her comeback over Ingrid Tandrevold was inexorable. The Norwegian had started the season very strong and had managed to accumulate a very important advantage over the other title contenders, Vittozzi and the French Simon and Braisaz-Bouchet. Lisa, on the other hand, who had positioned herself as declared objective the first step of the podium in the general classification, had started quietly despite the victory in the first race of the season at Ostersunds. At a certain point her name started to climb up the rankings stage after stage, always with the Norwegian flag of Tandrevold as a reference, and while Lisa collected first places and podiums, Ingrid collapsed more and more, until, after the world championship, they collapsed even the French who at a certain point in the season seemed unbeatable. Tandrevold’s lead crumbled weekend after weekend, until the last stage, that of Canmore in Canadawhen Lisa, in the key moment of her comeback, did not tremble, dominating the pursuit and individual races and taking home everything there was to take home: the world titles in her two favorite specialties and, the icing on the cake , the general one.

Nevertheless, the feeling that Lisa Vittozzi could do something really great, had occurred at the World Championships in Nove Mesto, Czech Republic, dominated by Julia Simon. The blue girl had hit the mark three podiums, including one gold, in four races individual races (only in the sprint had she remained empty) and the way in which she had triumphed in the individual had been a real test of strength. During the first shooting session her rifle jammed and she lost about fifteen seconds. Too many, for someone who generally leaves the range with an advantage over her opponents. From there an r startedfurious mount, finishing 20.5 seconds ahead of Hettich-Waltz in second and almost 30 (which, added to the 15 lost due to a technical problem make 45) over Julia Simon, which had seemed unbeatable in the other races. To accomplish it she needed zero errors with the rifle and the best performance ever on skis.

Lisa Vittozzi today is the best biathlete in the world for two reasons: she is the most regular and the most complete.

It is the most regular because, throughout the World Cup it has won “only” 4 out of 21 races – and it’s there anyway first Italian ever to succeed (Wierer stopped twice at 3 successes) – but she also achieved 8 podiums, 14 top 5 finishes and 19 top 10 finishes. This means that only twice has she remained outside the top 10 and one of these was the very race that gave her the crystal ball: twenty-first place in the Mass Start in Canmore last weekend, with Tandrevold eighth. And then, unlike her opponents, Lisa didn’t have any collapses.

It is the most complete because, in addition to being phenomenal with the rifle, he also defends himself on skis, a more unique than rare feature in the current panorama. To be clear, the fastest on skis is the Slovenian Anamarija Lampic, who is seventeenth in the overall rankings due to his shooting percentages: 71% from the floor and 58% standing. The German Vanessa Voigt, eighth in the general ranking, is impeccable in shooting (93.5% overall), but very slow both in releasing shots and in skiing, which makes her lose all the advantage gained by avoiding penalties. The title contenders, on the other hand, are slightly faster than Lisa on skis, are quick to release shots (especially Simon) and are precise on the range. Precise, but not infallible.

Vittozzi, on the other hand, is almost perfect. She uses her .22 caliber rifle as if it were the easiest thing in the world. He has a 93.1% on-target percentage, the highest ever for a world cup winner. To be clear, out of 420 bullets fired in these four and a half months, 391 ended up in the very small circle that represents the target to hit to avoid the penalty rounds. You closed the season with ten error-free races. Means that for almost half of the races – in which you go to the range four times, firing five shots – he didn’t miss one. Only two other women in the history of world biathlon have succeeded: for the record, Marie Laure Brunet and Irina Tananaiko. In her career there are forty races without errors and in this she is already the fifth ever.

▪️ 1st overall Cup in my career
▪️ 93.10% shooting: record for those who won the overall
▪️ 2 titles in the specialty rankings (individual, pursuit)
▪️ 1 individual world title
▪️ 4 medals at the World Championships
▪️ 5 wins in the season
▪️ 13 podium
▪️ 16 in top5#Vittozzi pic.twitter.com/2Hj7BbQzSk

— Eurosport IT (@Eurosport_IT) March 18, 2024

This precision combines good grip on the skis. On average it is 3.9 seconds slower than Lampic, the fastest on the circuit, and 3.1 compared to the fastest of the athletes who ended the season in the top 5, Braisaz-Bouchet. One less error on the shooting range, however, gains around thirty seconds, which explains how it is possible that Lisa, except for very rare bad days, always manages to be competitive, especially in the races in which she finds herself alone in managing advantages and disadvantages, at your own pace, knowing you can count on your rifle friend.

In fact, her only weakness seems to be her speed on skis: she lacks the inspiration that athletes like Simon, Tandrevold and Braisaz-Bouchet have. Lisa needs to be alone, or to be together and start again alone because her opponents make mistakes. If you arrive in a sprinta very likely scenario in the Mass Start format (in which everyone starts together), Lisa Vittozzi is probably not the one who wins. Yet, even in this competition format she achieved good results which allowed her to win the World Championship.

Today Lisa Vittozzi has realized her dream of climbing to the roof of the world in her favorite sport and her triumph, like every story of redemption, is the result of years of suffering and disappointments. Already in 2019 she was one step away from obtaining the crystal ball, but she collapsed, just like Tandrevold this year, in the season finale, probably paralyzed by a situation she had never found herself having to manage. From that moment on, we could talk about her career by paraphrasing one of the most beautiful Club Dogo songs, her namesake, which just as she was cradling the crystal ball in Canmore, resonated for the sixth time in the last two weeks within the walls of the Mediolanum Milan Forum: Lisa helps herself by jumping around the missteps.

For too long Lisa slipped on skis between series of crude rifle shootings, which prevented her from being competitive, precisely those shooting series which today have become her trademark. There was a period in which she dropped below 80% from standing and even reached 55% from the ground. Today that 55 is one of the topos most popular around which the emotional story of his rise revolves. As often happens, however, at a certain point everything makes sense again. Those races ruined by the disastrous series with the rifle probably (we like to think that this is the case) got her used to chasing, to increasing the pace on skis, which until two years ago only served her to limit damage and make a fool of herself, but today it allows it to make comebacks like the sensational one in Nove Mesto.

Looking at the calendar for the next two years, it seems that Lisa has found herself at the most propitious moment possible. In two years, in Italy there will be Winter Olympics. The biathlon races will be held at Anterselva, at the home of Dorothea Wierer who just two years ago in Beijing had written the word biathlon into the Italian vocabulary. Now it’s up to Lisa to ensure that she becomes one of the most used. Vittozzi will arrive at Milan-Cortina at the height of her maturity (at 31 years old) and with the awareness that she is one of the strongest athletes on the circuit, if not the strongest ever. Of course, predicting what will happen in two years on the snows of Trentino is very complicated, but now that she finally has one of her own, in moments of uncertainty Lisa will always be able to look into her crystal ball.

2024-03-22 08:00:00
#Lisa #Vittozzi #passionate #Biathlon