2014 Sochi Winter Olympics Games

Russia Snatches Improbable Biathlon Relay Gold

SOCHI, February 22 (R-Sport) – Russia claimed an improbable biathlon team relay gold on Saturday after a last-gasp shooting calamity from Norway's Emil Hegle Svendsen set Anton Shipulin on a course to victory.

Norway had been out in front at the final standing shooting but the usually dependable Svendsen missed twice. Shipulin shot clean along with Simon Schempp and overtook the German to score a gold that looked unlikely for most of the race at the Laura biathlon complex.

The Germans finished 3.5 seconds behind the Russians, with the Austrians claiming the bronze 29.8 seconds back.

It means host nation Russia equals two medal records. It now has 29 medals overall, the same as the Soviet team of 1988, and 11 gold, matching the total in Lillehammer 20 years ago.

The result, Russia's first biathlon title at its home games in the sport's last event, denied Norwegian legend Ole Einar Bjoerndalen a record ninth career Olympic gold.

At one stage the Russians had been half a minute off the pace, as Bjoerndalen took control in the third leg with a lead of more than 20 seconds over the Germans. But despite shooting clean, the 40-year-old allowed Arnd Peiffer to reel him in and by the final changeover there was less than ten seconds in it.

Dmitry Malyshko kept pace with Peiffer to squeeze the field together for the dramatic final leg finish.

The other victorious Russians were lead-off man Alexey Volkov and Evgeny Ustyugov. There was no place in the team for individual bronze medalist Evgeny Garanichev.

Russia's other biathlon medals have come from the women's relay with silver, and Olga Vilyukhina's silver in the women's sprint.

The result also puts a gloss on an otherwise disappointing biathlon campaign from the Russians on their home track.

The Norwegians, meanwhile, are denied a fourth biathlon gold of the games after Bjoerndalen took the sprint, Svendsen the mass start and the mixed team the relay – an appropriate reflection of the nation’s domination of the sport.

An expected challenge from a strong France team led by pursuit and individual champion Martin Fourcade never materialized, with the team finishing eighth.

magnumcromagnon wrote:

TR1 wrote:Good, I don't want or care for the Ukraine at all .

Most importantly for me, is the loss of defense ties. I have been counting for the years, but looks like it may come sooner than I expected.

Plus they did not do well in the Olympics at all. Now Belarus with its 5 golds, theres a tasty target lol.

There's nothing good about that at all. The implications of a russophobic govt. are bad enough, just look at Georgia when it had the russophobic Hawkishvili, he had a very lax attitude towards controlling Dagestani extremists penetrating Georgian territory, now imagine the same with Crimean Tartars extremists and keep mind in they'll be motivated to carryout bombings in Russia because of the actions of the Georgian Joseph Stalin deporting Tartars to Kazakhstan. You'll have greater amounts of incidents of meddling in Russian public daily lives, I mean you have the Pussy Riot debacle, where the band members stole a frozen chicken and used it as dildo out in public...I mean my gosh Russians are being demonized for having public indecency laws!!! Meanwhile there's 11.6-16 million Hispanic Americans stuck in civil rights purgatory, and you have a world wide network of torture and kidnapping being ran by NATO. It makes you wonder if human civilization will survive an additional 2 hundred years of existence when the self-proclaimed "free thinker" class cant keep their priorities straight!

At the end of the day, the Ukraine is finished and if what's left of it tries to make a move on Russian military facilities/troops then it will be annihilated to the extreme; Russia's gloves will fly right off. Even the West won't support them; Kiev is looking more like 90s Grozny by the day; I wouldn't be surprised if they soon start having public executions/already had them.

All the actions of the current government are illegitimate, deputies of the Regions party and other figures deposed government are either on the run, in hiding or have been cowed into submission; there are reports of families being held hostage, torture, you name it. And this illegitimate parliament has elected an illegitimate new head of MVD; who has rapidly started subordinating police units to him across Eastern Ukraine. You can imagine the situation is volatile.

IF someone uses Twitter you already have to question their intelligence. wrote:

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