Travel during the COVID-19 pandemic may be strenuous, but hopping to another bubble had its merits for Sarah Beaudry.
While competing in Austria this past weekend, the Prince George Olympian gathered enough strength to respectable placings in the third leg of the Biathlon World Cup to earn her first pair of points for the 2020-21 tour.
She is now one of 66 racers, one of just two Canadians, to crack the international scoreboard as of Sunday (Dec. 13), but she’ll need to continue to perform at her best in order to catch up with the front of the pack.
The 26-year-old also earned her best individual placing on the year thus far, claiming 39th out of 109 competitors in the women’s 7.5 km sprint.
Beaudry battled her way to the top-40 finish 1:28.9 behind first-place Dnizara Alimbakava of Belarus, and hit 90 per cent of the targets (9/10) in the shooting range.
She was also three spots back of her Canadian teammate Emma Lunder in the 36th position.
According to Beaudry’s blog, prior to arriving in Austria, she’s taken six COVID-19 tests in the International Biathlon Union (IBU) bubble and that travel has been notably difficult at times.
“The Joensuu Airport [Finland] is quite small, smaller than the Prince George airport,” the Duchess Park graduate wrote.
“The teams on our flight were bused to the airport at staggered times but the times ended up not being spaced out enough. When the flight is full of only biathletes that means lots of oversized duffels, rifle cases, massage tables and ski bags. There were too few check-in counters at the airport and therefore they were not able to process us as quickly as the buses were dropping off new teams. This resulted in the small check in area getting overfilled with people and bags, with the momentum steadily pushing towards the check in counter. Once the Canadian team got checked in, we happily moved to a bit more space and tried to keep our distance from the nose hangers, the mask gappers and those who take exceptionally large breaks in between water sips.”
Beaudry does credit the IBU for organizing the right charter buses and planes to try and make the transition between countries as smooth as it can.
“Some teams were doing an excellent job at distancing and wearing masks. As the first big “IBU bubble” travel day it’s hard to expect everything to be perfect and hopefully everything just gets better and smoother as the season goes on.”
Beaudry finished 50th out of 59 racers in the women’s 10 km pursuit on Sunday, hitting 14 of 20 targets in the range and ending up nearly five minutes behind Norway’s Marte Olsbu Roeiseland in first.
Her Canadian 4x6 km relay team crossed the finish line in 15th out of 23 countries on Saturday (Dec. 12).
Beaudry remains in Austria for new upcoming races at Hochflizen, roughly 110 km east of Innsbruck, starting Friday (Dec. 18).
