February 8, 2025

Johannes Dale wins being fastest on the skis as well as the most accurate

Norway’s Johannes Dale celebrated his first ever victory on the world cup circuit after having hit all and ski the fastest.

Dale finished ninth in the 2019-20 overall world cup. He has performed very well a multitude of times and his victory was far from shocking. Our biathlon model had him ranked in fifth place based on the projected seconds behind metric and gave him about a five percent chance of winning.

Dale performed very well, and put down a spectacularly fast last lap when he had hit all the targets. He knew that the dominant athlete of the last few seasons, Johannes Thingnes Boe, as well as , Tarjei Boe, had started behind him and that he had to ski all out on the last lap to make his performance hard to beat. As a result he was some 20 seconds faster than athletes like Johannes Thingnes Boe, Sebastian Samuelsson, Tarjei Boe and Sturla Holm Laegreid on the last lap alone.

Quentin Fillon Maillet showed greatly improved form if compared with his races in Finland and grabbed second place after hitting all of his targets and putting own the seventh fastest skiing time. Still, he was beaten by Dale by more than 17 seconds.

Fabien Claude ensured that the French team would have two athletes on the podium as he finished third after both skiing (third fastest of the day) and shooting fast (14th fastest of the day).

The current leader and our model’s firm favourite to win of the BMW IBU Overall Biathlon World Cup, Johannes Thingnes Boe, led after the prone shooting and was less than two seconds behind Johannes Dale entering the range for the second and final time. However, as he missed one of the targets in the standing shooting he left the range in fourth place. Even with a somewhat slow last lap, by his standards, he finished the race in fourth place.

Sebastian Samuelsson put down another strong showing to finish in fifth. He had all ten targets, but was only the 14th fastest skier of the day, 43 seconds slower than Johannes Dale.

Emilien Jacquelin missed one prone and one standing, but as he was the second fastest skier of the day, this was still good enough for him to place sixth. Not a bad day for the French team as Guigonnat finished 14th after hitting ten of ten.

Vetle Sjaastad Christiansen, Bendedikt Doll, Sturla Holm Laegreid and Erik Lesser all hit nine of ten to finish seventh to tenth.

Tarjei Boe was in third less than five seconds behind the winner when entering the range for the standing shooting. As he missed two, he narrowly missed out on a top ten spot, finishing sixth tenths of a second behind Erik Lesser in tenth.

The Austrians shot very well. Three of their athletes hit all ten and Felix Leitner finished eleventh, Simon Eder twelfth and David Komatz 22nd.

Highlights of the race have been made available by the IBU on their youtube account.

Mathis Brorstad

Mathis Brorstad

Mathis Brorstad is a Norwegian freelance writer. He is mainly covering Athletics, Biathlon and other Winter Sports. In the past he has done work on odds and probabilities.

View all posts by Mathis Brorstad →

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