Career Retrospective: Kati Wilhelm
German biathlete Kati Wilhelm (sporting some delightful red hair, I might add) is the last (finally!) in my list of retiring athletes to cover. That Wikipedia link tells me that she was actually dubbed “Little Red Riding Hood” by the German press due to both her hair and a red hat she wore for all races.
Wilhelm is an exceptionally accomplished biathlete: I found 69 podium finishes in major events (World Cup, Olympics or World Championships), which included 4 individual Olympic medals and 5 more from World Championships. And of course that’s on top of numerous medal winning German relay teams.
Let’s take a look at her results:
Career Retrospective: Vincent Defrasne
Vincent Defrasne is a French biathlete who retired this year (only one more of these after this one, I promise!). I can find nine podium finishes throughout his career, including a gold at the Turin Olympics (12.5km pursuit) and a bronze at the 2007 World Biathlon Championships. In addition to these individual accomplishments, he’s been a part of numerous medal winning French relay teams.
Career Retrospective: Sandrine Bailly
Next up among biathlon retirements is French star Sandrine Bailly. She has numerous Biathlon World Cup victories to her name and has been an integral part of the French biathlon relay team.
One notable victory links her to another retiring skier, Martina Beck. These women actually shared the gold medal at the 2003 Biathlon World Championships, which according to wikipedia, was a first for the sport of biathlon.
Let’s take a look at all of her results: Read more
Career Retrospective: Simone Hauswald
I’ve mentioned before that one of the reasons I enjoy writing posts about skiing is that I learn stuff about my sport. Writing up a career retrospective post for German biathlete Simone Hauswald was one of those experiences.
Simone Hauswald has competed internationally since 2000-2001, although she only did a handful of World Cups until the 2002-2003 season. In that time she’s been a good, but not dominant skier. She’s had 18 trips to the podium in individual races (and quite a few more on strong German relay teams) over her career in World Cup, OWG or WBC races.
The cool thing that I learned about Hauswald, though, was that she really went out with a bang this season: Read more
Career Retrospective: Tore Ruud Hofstad
Another helpful commenter reminded me that Norwegian Tore Ruud Hofstad also retired this past July. My results for Hofstad stretch back to World Junior races in 1998 up to his retirement in 2010. I think one of the reasons I may have overlooked him is that he didn’t really race much last season. In fact, I can’t seem to find any individual races for him from the 2009-2010 season.
He won two individual medals at World Championships in 2003 (Silver) and 2005 (Bronze) and was frequently a member of the Norwegian men’s relay team, so he racked up some more medals there, mostly gold.
He also had a handful of World Cup podiums: four, by my count. He raced almost exclusively distance events, so we won’t bother looking at sprint results: Read more
Career Retrospective: Kristina Smigun-Vaehi
I can’t believe I forgot about the dominant Estonian skier Kristina Smigun-Vaehi. For individual events (distance and sprint), her stats are amazing: three Olympic medals (2 Gold), four World Championship medals and forty-nine World Cup podiums. 106 of her 161 World Cup results were top ten finishes. She might not have as much Olympic hardware as a few of her contemporaries, but she always seemed to be in the hunt for a medal.
Of course, Smigun ran into a spot of trouble back in 2002 I believe, testing positive for steroids but was officially “cleared” by FIS when her B sample came up clean. Needless to say, a lot of people remained suspicious, which is par for the course when doping is involved. In any case, let’s take a look back at her career, distance races first:
Career Retrospective Retrospective
I thought it would be nice to collect all the cross-country skier retirement posts in one place, in case you missed some along the way. So here they are…
- Rene Sommerfeldt (GER)
- Sabina Valbusa (ITA)
- Anna Olson (SWE)
- Sara Renner (CAN)
- Virpi Kuitunen (FIN)
- Claudia Nystad (GER)
- Reto Burgermeister (SUI)
- Milan Sperl (CZE)
- Laurence Rochat (SUI)
Anyone famous that I’m forgetting? Or even not so famous?
Update: Surprised no one’s mentioned Kristina Smigun-Vaehi. I’ve left her out, haven’t I? Easily fixed…
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