Alpen Cup Racing Success

Biathlon East Australia’s Australian Development Team athletes recently completed two weekends of Alpen Cups racing, achieving improved success and great learning experiences. The events were at Obertilliach (AUT) and Val di Femme (ITA) and included formats of Sprint, Pursuit and Individual.  Alpen Cups are endorsed IBU events at the Regional level and include the countries of Austria, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Slovenia. They are of a high level and rank one under IBU Junior Cups.

Athletes were competing in Junior (under 22yrs), Youth II (under 19yrs) and Youth I (under 17yrs) age categories with the events involved 2 shoots, 4 shoots, skiing penalties and time penalties. Wind was a factor on some of the days, as was nerves and tension. 

The first weekend of racing at Obertilliach resulted in some good learning on managing wind and skiing speed with shooting accuracy. Ally Sydun-West, Isabella Moon and Noah Bradford performed well to achieve results of less than 20% behind. Phoenix Sparke’s skiing was fast on both days and a good learning experience to balance skiing speed with shooting accuracy.

The 2^nd weekend of Alpen Cup racing at Val di Femme illustrated the benefit of a further 2 weeks of training after Alpen Cup No2, which focussed on shooting accuracy and managing the transition to shooting at the Range.

Sprint results with an increase in shooting accuracy, resulted in a top 20 finish for Noah Bradford  and sub 20% behind results for Noah and Phoenix Sparke. Both Ally Sydun-West and Phoenix showed good speed on their skis. It was the 2^nd weekend of racing for Chelsey Johnson, after an extended racing absence, with her customary shooting accuracy starting to re-appear. Jack Hirst, across all 4 events of the 2 weekends of racing, continued to consolidate his training and earlier racing, showing improved results and racing maturity. 

Click here for full event results and view Australian results in the Table below.