Biathlon World Championships
The first Biathlon World Championships (BWCH) was held in 1958, with individual and team contests for men. The number of events has grown significantly over the years. Beginning in 1984, women biathletes had their own World Championships, and fina ...
was held in Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia from March 3–13, 2011.
There was a total of 11 competitions: sprint, pursuit, individual, mass start, and relay races for men and women, and mixed relay. All the events during this championships also counted for the
2010–11 Biathlon World Cup
The 2010–11 Biathlon World Cup was a multi-race tournament over a season of biathlon, organised by the International Biathlon Union. The season started on 29 November 2010 in Östersund, Sweden and ended 20 March 2011 in Holmenkollen, Norway.
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season.
Championship highlights
The Championships kicked off with the Mixed relay event which is seeking to make its way onto the Olympic programme for the 2014 games in Sochi. As the first event of the programme, it was finally given importance by the different teams, with all nations fielding their best teams, in difference to earlier world cup events. The Norwegians won it, overtaking Germany on the last leg. The veteran Ole Einar Bjørndalen won his fifteenth world championship gold medal in the process and his first in the mixed relay, giving him a full set of gold medals in the six events that are currently contested.
Tarjei Bø, Martin Fourcade, Kaisa Mäkäräinen and
Arnd Peiffer
Arnd Peiffer (born 18 March 1987) is a German former biathlete. His greatest achievements were sprint victories in the 2018 Winter Olympics and the Biathlon World Championships 2011. During his career, he also won three World Championship relay go ...
won their first champion titles in career. Martin Fourcade also won a full scope of medals, gold, silver and bronze at these championships.
The surprise medalists included
Maxim Maximov
Maxim Gennadyevich Maksimov (russian: Максим Геннадьевич Максимов, born September 6, 1979 in Izhevsk) is a retired Russian biathlete and biathlon coach. He took two individual medals in the Biathlon World Championships, a ...
of Russia,
Tina Bachmann
Tina Bachmann (born 15 July 1986 in Schmiedeberg) is a retired German professional biathlete
The biathlon is a winter sport that combines cross-country skiing and rifle shooting. It is treated as a race, with contestants skiing thro ...
of Germany and
Vita Semerenko
Vita Semerenko ( uk, Віта Олександрівна Семеренко; born 18 January 1986) is a Ukrainian biathlete. She is Olympic champion in women's relay, Olympic medalist and multiple World championships medalist. She is one of t ...
of Ukraine.
Helena Ekholm literally swept the field in the individual with zero shooting and fast skiing, winning more than 2 minutes over the runner-up Bachmann and making one of the greatest 1–2 place margins in biathlon history.
Schedule of events
The provisional schedule of the event is below. All times in UTC+5.
2011
File:2011 Events Collage.png, From top left, clockwise: a protester partaking in Occupy Wall Street heralds the beginning of the Occupy movement; protests against Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who was killed that October; a young man celebrate ...