It the skiing don't get ya then the shooting will by Frank T. Matheson Snow belt residents in the United States are seeing the growth in popularity of an unusual winter sport called biathlon. A combination of two seemingly incompatible sports, cross-country skiing and rifle marksmanship, biathlon is attracting skiers, runners and shooters. Over the past few years several biathlon races have been held in the Park City area and two are scheduled this winter: on the Park Meadows Golf Course Jan. 28 and on the Mountain Dell Golf Course Feb. 18. A shooting clinic will also be held for interested biathlon competitors in the Memorial Building Jan. 17 and 19 at 7:30 p.m. For details, call the Park City Recreation Department at 649-9461 or Michael Martin at 649-6424. Fighting and hunting on skis has been practiced for centuries in many snowbound regions, but the competitive application of hunting on skis is a relatively modern sport. The first biathlon championship was conducted in Saalfedon, Austria in 1958. In 1960 at Squaw Valley, California, biathlon became an official Olympic sport. Biathlon is widely practiced prac-ticed in the Soviet Union, most obscure" winter Olympic Olym-pic sport. USBA Vice President William Martin estimates there is a maximum of 1,000 men, women and juniors who compete in the U.S. compared to 100,000 nordic skiers and six million alpine skiers. As biathlon in the U.S. attracts little television coverage, American biath-letes biath-letes do not receive fat promotional contracts. "We're the alley cats, scraping and fighting for everything we get," says 29-year-old Peter Hoaz, a veteran of two Olympics. The biathlon competitor needs to be a fast, skillful skier and accurate shooter. Skiers use the same lightweight light-weight ski equipment and apparel as the cross-country racer. A match-grade .22 caliber rifle, lighter than most target rifle versions, is slung over the back of the skier by a special harness. The rifle is equipped with a unique stock, fast-loading clips and devices to protect the barrel and sights from clogging snow. It also has a bolt action with a short locking motion for the quickness needed in shooting. Special ammunition am-munition has been developed to maintain accuracy in cold temperatures. " ) If A Biathlon competitor cocks her rifle. finish line. The 20-kilometer race follows the same format, only there are double the number of loops skied and shot fired. Four five-round clips are fired alternating between the prone and offhand off-hand positions. The team events are three- and four-man four-man or woman relays of 7.5 kilometer legs each. Each skier fires two five-round clips, one in each position. The targets contain glass bull's eye centers, measuring four centimeters across for the prone position and 11 centimeters for the offhand. Every shot which strikes outside the bull denotes penalty minutes added ad-ded to the overall race time, or a penalty loop of 100 to 150 meters adjacent to the range that must be skied before returning to the race course. One cannot be just a shooter or a skier to win; only great skiers who are also great shooters excel. Envision yourself sprinting sprint-ing several miles, stopping abruptly at a 50-meter rifle range, and within one minute unslinging a rifle, loading, assuming a position and accurately firing five rounds. Think what a pounding pound-ing heart, heaving chest and dilated eyes would do for your shot group. You must also switch mentally from the attitude of an all-out racer to one of a calm, slow-paced slow-paced shooter. The biathlon is an equipment-intensive sport where at times it seems a lot can go wrong. You can miss the wax, break a pole or have rifle troubles. I have seen people lose magazines in the snow, people on the range with empty magazines because they forgot to load them, and even a skier who started a race on someone else's skis. Think of some of the amazing "head plants" you have done while on crosscountry cross-country skis. Now imagine doing that with a rifle on your back. It is not surprising sur-prising that fast, icy tracks result in broken wooden rifle stocks and unintentionally East Germany, Finland, Sweden and Norway. Since 1960 athletes from these countries have won 32 of the 33 medals awarded. "There are more biathlon coaches in Russia than there are biathletes in America," says Robert Brewster, a national team hopeful from Alaska. Biathlon is nearly a national sport in the USSR. Howard Buxton, president of the United States Biathlon Association (USBA), compares com-pares it to tennis in the U.S. Buxton adds that he saw about 200,000 spectators at the World Biathlon Championships Cham-pionships in Minsk two years ago. No medals ever have been won by an American in what the New, York; Times; describes as "perhaps the Biathletes compete in 10-and 10-and 20-kilometer distances. The races take place on groomed trails designed in loops radiating from a common com-mon starting point, shooting area and finish line. In a 10-kilometer race, the competitor skis a loop of approximately ap-proximately three kilometers kilo-meters that channels him into a 50-meter range. He fires five rounds in a prone position at a cluster of five targets. Upon skiing to the range, the skier removes his poles and drops to the snow, with skis still attached. After the five rounds are fired, another loop is run. The skier then returns to the range and shoots in the offhand position, emptying another, irrrmagazine. The competitor then races to the "readjusted" sights. I used to think the number one consideration was to protect your body when falling. Now I know it is to protect the rifle. After a hard fall on an icy downhill turn on a Minnesota course, I skied into the range, looked down at my rifle and found I had broken off my rear aperture. aper-ture. I did not shoot well that race. The physics of biathlon can at times be painful. Picture Pic-ture falling backwards at speed. Where does the barrel of the rifle go? Some biathletes can be recognized by the bumps on the back of their heads. Some people ski with a rifle so much, they forget that the rifle is there. At a race in Vermont, one skier left the track on an icy turn, skied into the forest and ducked under a low-hanging limb. His head cleared but his rifle did not. When he came to, he had a broken collarbone. Skill, weather, equipment and falls are some of the variables that add to the challenge of biathlon. Women are very strong competitors in the sport and the national team is comprised com-prised of both men and women. Women often out-shoot out-shoot the men. Marie Alkire, U.S. Biathlon Team shooting coach, says women often are easier to teach and progress more quickly as shooters because they do not have the same bad habits as those developed by little boys shooting BB guns. Women compete in the national, World Cup and Olympic races. One only needs to see the look on the face of a tucked skier streaking downhill on an icy track or the smile of a shooter leaving the range after af-ter cleaning all five targets to appreciate the thrill of biathlon.