Heartbeat: US Biathlon Podcast US Biathlon

Every biathlete dreams of skiing into the range and having the crowd roar with each shot. Doing it on the snow where you grew up is all the sweeter! At the IBU World Cup in Soldier Hollow, Utah native Vincent Bonacci and his teammates had just that feeling as they skied to a best-ever fourth in the men’s relay. Heartbeat caught up with Bonacci at the end of the season to relive that magical weekend.

Some might consider the impressive Soldier Hollow finish as the luck on home snow in a sport where fortunes can rise and fall quickly. But combined with the fifth in World Championships a month earlier – well this is for real now!

Bonacci grew up on the trails of the 2002 Olympic venue of Soldier Hollow. Coming back home for the World Cup meant family and friends lining the track. It was the first event of the three days and he was skiing opening leg.

In his Heartbeat interview, Bonacci dives into his opening relay lap in great detail from the madhouse on the first lap to his strategy for making time on the field with his knowledge of the course and how he paced himself. And laughs as he thinks back to shooting clean in standing while feeling like he was standing on a waterbed!

“I thought, I would love to do well in front of my home crowd. We’ll see how this goes. I just tried to follow my process. I managed to put down all the targets with some lucky flinches there! For me, it wasn’t necessarily a super high-pressure shooting – it wasn’t terribly nerve-wracking.”

Bonacci was featured a year ago in Heartbeat S3 Ep11 on his World Cup debut. Now with two seasons under his belt, you can hear his experience and maturity kicking in as he talks about the year on the tour and his decision to finish up the season on the cross country SuperTour.

His season opened with a sixth at the IBU Cup in Finland. He made his first pursuit at the World Cup in Lenzerheide, then posted a standout finish at the Open European Championships – standing in the flower ceremony.

Listen in to this episode of Heartbeat to learn more about one of the rising stars of U.S. Biathlon: Vincent Bonacci.

“Having a couple of good relays with the team – it's a crazy feeling. It's a little bit American to watch relays and be like winning a relay is less of a personal victory. But you do it and it's like, doing well in a relay is almost like more of a victory because you get to share it with all your friends.” 

This weekend American fans will be trackside at Utah’s Olympic and Paralympic venue of Soldier Hollow as the BMW IBU World Cup Biathlon tour comes to the USA for the first time in five years. In anticipation, Heartbeat went behind the scenes at Soldier Hollow to learn more about the event – how it got back to America after five years, what it takes to put it together, and how fans can best take in the action.

The event is organized by the Utah Olympic Legacy Foundation (UOLF) along with U.S. Biathlon. Heartbeat gathered in the media center of the brand-new competition building at Soldier Hollow, overlooking the range, to chat with the experts. Calum Clark, the chief operating officer of UOLF, is a veteran of more than two decades organizing winter and summer events at the Olympic and World Championship level, starting with the 2000 Summer Games at Sydney. Sara Studebaker-Hall is a well-known figure in biathlon, a two-time Olympian, now operations director for U.S. Biathlon and the chief of competition.

Studebaker-Hall retired after the 2014 Olympics, finding a pathway for herself working in biathlon. She earned her international referee’s license in 2019, serving as assistant chief of competition for the World Cup, then moved up to oversee Youth and Junior World Championships three years later. She is also now an IBU technical delegate.

The World Cup tour last visited America in 2019 at Soldier Hollow. Then, in 2002, the IBU’s Youth and Junior World Championships came to Utah, a showcase event for upcoming future stars. Looking ahead, Utah also has its eyes on the 2034 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, bringing the ultimate sport stage back to the state.

To get the tour to return, UOLF and U.S. Biathlon worked together with Canada to create a two-weekend finale to the season-long tour that began in Sweden last November. Over the next two weekends, final titles will be decided in events at Soldier Hollow and up north at Canmore, Alberta.

Thousands are expected over the weekend, with racing Friday, Saturday, Sunday (March 8-10) at Soldier Hollow.

Listen in to this episode of Heartbeat to learn more, including whether or not the dinosaur will return. And if you can’t get to Soldier Hollow, you can watch it all live at biathlonworld.com.

Imagine being 17 or 18 years old and traveling the world, living your life out of a duffel bag while pursuing the sport you love. That’s the life of Alaskan Elias Soule and Utah native Emily Caldwell. Elias and Emily are two of the top U.S. Biathlon junior athletes, rising up out of outstanding club programs and now taking their skills on the road. Heartbeat caught up with them at the IBU Junior World Championships in Estonia, just weeks after competing in the Youth Olympic Games in South Korea.
Soule, now 17, grew up in Anchorage, discovering biathlon around age 10. He was able to grow his skills through both the Alaska Winter Stars and Anchorage Biathlon Club programs, skiing in the shadows of role models like Gus Schumacher, who recently won a FIS Cross Country World Cup in Minneapolis. He competed in 2023 at the IBU Youth World Championships in Kazhakstan and this February at the IBU Junior World Championships in Estonia, as well as the Youth Olympic Games in Korea.
Campbell, who just turned 18, had many sport opportunities growing up in Park City, and she tried them all. She started in alpine skiing before moving to cross country with the Park City Nordic Club. Then she found biathlon and now trains with the program at Soldier Hollow. Like Soule, she made her international debut a year ago in Kazakhstan, this year competing at the Youth Olympic Games and IBU Junior World Championships.
This episode of Heartbeat comes to you on the eve of the IBU Junior World Championships in Estonia as Elias and Emily recap their adventures on the road and look ahead, with each of their careers on a different pathway for the future.

For over a decade, Susan Dunklee was a prominent face of the U.S. Biathlon Team, competing in three Olympics and winning silver at the 2017 IBU Biathlon World Championships. Now in her second season of retirement from international competition, she’s finding a joyous pathway as a biathlon coach at her longtime home at Vermont’s Craftsbury Outdoor Center. Dunklee spoke to Heartbeat about her coaching evolution and the lessons she’s learning.

Dunklee came into retirement after the 2022 season with a plan, becoming the running director at Craftsbury. But she longed to stay connected to the snow, recently transitioning into a new role leading biathlon. Already in her first season, she’s making an impact at Craftsbury and with the next generation of the U.S. Biathlon as a guest coach in the IBU Cup tour.

Following her IBU Cup guest coaching debut in January at Martell and Ridnau, Italy, she capsulized her thoughts in an impactful Instagram post that talked about the coaching environment and what she’s learned. “As an athlete, you need to be selfish. As a coach, you must be selfless.”

Whether you’re an athlete, a coach, a club leader or a fan, this episode of Heartbeat will bring you both insights and entertainment. What do you think Susan misses least from not traveling the world as an athlete? And what’s the one thing she really does miss?

This is a fun podcast with one of the sport’s true superstars. Click in now to enjoy a Heartbeat conversation with Susan Dunklee.


“As I admired the sunrise this morning, two hours AFTER starting my workday, I thought back on how many people put in these crazy work hours for me all the years I raced biathlon.”
- Susan Dunklee, Biathlon Coach

If the recent U.S. Biathlon Trials event at Mt. Itasca Winter Sports Center is any indicator, athlete development is on the upswing. Record numbers of athletes were on hand seeking to qualify for major youth and junior events. In this episode of Heartbeat, U.S. Biathlon’s Director of Athlete Development Tim Burke, talks about sustained competitive excellence as the objective of U.S. Biathlon’s strategic plan and the progress that’s being made.
Burke, a longtime athlete who won silver at the World Championships in 2013, is part of a strong athletic program at U.S. Biathlon. He works alongside Director of Sport Development John Farra and a longtime biathlete now managing high-performance, Lowell Bailey. The three all have roots growing up in Lake Placid and competing at the highest level. Now Burke is finding gratification in helping nurture the next generation to success.
At Mt. Itasca in late December, 80 athletes showed up to race – a bump of 45% from previous years. Notably, too, the field included a record 31 women - a big focus for U.S. Biathlon.
The trials offered athletes an opportunity to vie for spots on a wide range of international teams, most notably the Youth Olympic Games in South Korea and the IBU’s Youth and Junior World Championships in Estonia.
This episode of Heartbeat takes you into the heart of athlete development, representing the next generation of biathletes who will represent Team USA in the coming years.
Tim, how do you describe your role with U.S. Biathlon?
My title is the director of athlete development. However, we're a very small organization, so titles are one thing, but all of us do a little bit of everything. I work very closely with Lowell in high performance and with John Farra in sport development. But my main role is kind of working in the middle of the U.S. Biathlon pipeline – really focusing on those athletes in the middle of our pipeline who are coming up, ensuring that they have the opportunities and what they need to succeed in this part of their career so they can make a smooth transition into the senior circuit.
How does your role fit into U.S. Biathlon’s strategic plan?
Our plan of sustained competitive excellence. So what does that mean? That means taking us from an organization that has occasionally had some success for sure, that we're all very proud of, but we want to have that more consistently. And to have that more consistently, we need to be more professional. We need more athletes in our pipeline, and ultimately, we need to be able to field teams on the World Cup, at World Championships, at the Olympics, where we can field a full team of athletes who are capable of stepping onto that podium. If we can do that, we will finally win that elusive Olympic medal. But it all starts at the bottom. It all starts with grassroots. It all starts at our clubs. It all starts down there building those numbers so that we have the athletes, enough athletes coming through our pipeline that can rise to the top.
What differences do you see in athlete development today versus a few years ago?
One of the biggest differences right now, as compared to when I came through the pipeline, is we're seeing a lot more of these crossover nordic athletes transitioning into biathlon. And it's not only true for our country, but it's true for others as well. You've seen other countries have a lot of success, like Sweden, like Germany, like Slovenia right now. And we want to be a part of that, and we have been a part of that. If you look at our national team right now, if you look at the World Cup that just happened this morning, many of those athletes racing for us, racing in that US uniform, are athletes that came over from cross country at a pretty late age. A lot of them came after they finished college. You know, they were successful collegiate skiers and they wanted to try something different. And we tried to provide those opportunities for them in biathlon. And that's one thing that we a

There are many routes into biathlon. Grace Castonguay is part of a new generation of athletes who are finding the sport and moving quickly up the ranks. A passionate runner, Castonguay only got into cross-country skiing when an injury curtailed her running. She loved it! Just a few years later, she made her World Cup debut in December 2023, racing in Hochfilzen and Lenzerheide.

When Castonguay first stepped onto skis during high school in 2019, she passionately embraced the sport. Together with her younger brother Theo, they traveled around the New Hampshire high school circuit. In her senior year, she helped the Kennett High School Eagles – Sean Doherty’s alma mater – win a state title.

The vital step in her storybook tale came when she accompanied Theo to a fall biathlon camp at Utah’s Soldier Hollow in October 2020. There, she caught the attention of coach Zach Hall, who invited her to the biathlon range. Now she was really hooked! 

She progressed quickly. The next March (2021), she raced in her first biathlon event – U.S. Nationals at West Yellowstone. In October 2021, she was the second and third junior in races at the Soldier Hollow Schutzenski trials. While she failed to make the Junior Worlds team out of trials, she doubled down on cross-country, transferring mid-year to ski for St. Michael’s College.

That December (2022), she posted strong results again during trial races at Craftsbury, qualifying for the IBU Cup and eventually the IBU Youth and Junior World Championships in Kazakhstan, where she had the top U.S. women’s results in both sprint and pursuit.

Her success on the college carnival circuit and with biathlon has created a bit of a juggling act for Castonguay, which she is embracing. As the team captain for the Purple Knights, she’s committed to the college schedule in January and February. But she is also looking to take advantage of her biathlon opportunity, going to Europe for the first races of the second trimester before heading back to ski for St. Michael’s. In the back of her mind, she realizes that the NCAA Championships in Steamboat Springs overlap with the IBU World Cup in Soldier Hollow in early March.

Needless to say, it will be a busy season. But for a young athlete who only slid on a ski track four years ago, she’s anxious to embrace every single opportunity, be that as a member of the Ethan Allen Biathlon Club, the St. Michael’s Purple Knights, or the U.S. Biathlon Team.

Here’s a sampling of what you’ll learn in this episode of Heartbeat. This is a remarkable story of a young athlete’s passion for sport and the emotions that athletic success can bring.

So, Grace, that was a long road trip!
This was my longest span of time in Europe – my longest time away from home forever. It was about a month and a half on the road.

How did you originally get into skiing?
So the punchline of this story is that I actually did not learn to ski, or step foot on skis, until four years ago. So, I am pretty much a baby in this sport. I grew up playing soccer and running cross country. When I was 14, I broke my leg playing soccer, and that kind of switched me fully into the endurance mode or lifestyle. I ran high school cross country and was really into running. I wanted to run Division 1 in college. That was my big goal. And then, because of the lasting, effects of my broken leg – I broke my tibia and fibula, which caused my growth plates to close. – running just really did not suit my body. I broke down a lot. My mom became the high school Nordic coach for our team so my brother could enter races. My indoor track season ended a little early and she was like, ‘Come on. Like, don't you want to join the team? It will look good on college resumes.’ And I figured, hey, why not? I entered my first Nordic ski race about three weeks after I learned to ski. I looked like Bambi on ice skates. 

What clicked for you when Zach Hall invited you to the range in Soldier Hollow?
I