Double Cross

Sarah Konrad sprawled on the mat in front of firing lane No. 2, skis splayed behind her. Working to control her breathing, she sighted her rifle, then squeezed off five shots at the silver dollar-sized targets, 50 meters away.

She hit three and leaped to her skis, slinging the rifle onto her back.

With the powerful skating motion of freestyle cross-country skiing, she pushed off toward the penalty loop.

Algis Shalna, coach of the U.S. biathlon team, charged across the snow to meet her.

“Sarah,” Shalna yelled. “You cross-fired. You have to ski five penalty laps. Five! Go! Go!”

A costly error. The targets she hit had all been in lane No. 1, the shooting station next to hers.

The 5-foot-3 Konrad had incurred the most penalties possible. She put her head down and went.

Konrad has the compact, thick thighs of a speedskater and the broad back of a cross-country skier. When she starts skiing from a dead stop, her skis leap off the snow. She skied around and around the 150-meter penalty loop while her competitors skied one or two laps for their misses before taking off down the race course.

A lesser athlete might have given up. At about 30 seconds a lap, her mistake would add about 2 1/2 minutes to her time.

But Konrad, remarkably, considering that she’s 38, is no lesser athlete. She is stubborn -- and incredibly fit. True, things were not going her way at the Olympic trials in Fort Kent, Maine. She had finished 11th the day before, but as she skied the penalty loop, she refused to yield to defeat.

It was still two weeks before she would make history, becoming the first U.S. woman to make two teams -- biathlon and cross-country skiing -- in the same Winter Games. On this bitterly cold final Friday of 2005, she was just another athlete clinging to an Olympic dream.

So she did what came naturally: She bore down and asked her legs and lungs to keep her in the race. She crossed the finish line winded and frustrated.

“That was awful, just awful,” she grimaced. “That may have been the mistake that cost me the Olympics.”

With its curious combination of skiing and target shooting, the biathlon is frequently called the most antagonistic discipline of the Winter Olympics. It pits the body against the mind, requiring winded racers coming into the shooting range to calm the quaking demands of the hearts and lungs, then shoot with steady precision.

Cross-country and biathlon, like swimming and water polo, are similar sports in that all biathletes must also be cross-country skiers, just as all water polo players must be strong swimmers. But shooting, like ballhanding, introduces elements to one sport that are never involved in the other.

In cross-country skiing, there are two racing styles. The traditional parallel slide-and-glide motion of skis along twin tracks is called classical skiing, the arms alternate in an exaggerated running motion. The freestyle form is called skate skiing. It pairs a powerful diagonal kick similar to speedskating with an explosive push from planting both poles at the same time.

Biathletes are skate skiers, and that is Konrad’s ace in the hole.

“Sarah is an incredibly fast skier,” said Rachel Steer, the Alaskan who has led American women in biathlon for the last several years and is the top biathlete on the U.S. team.

The day she cross-fired, Konrad skied the course faster than every other competitor. She made up her lost time and then some, finishing third. It was a remarkable display of both her strengths and her weakness.

Sarah Konrad was born in Los Angeles, moved to Davis, then to Bishop, where she grew up downhill skiing on the dollar-a-day deal Mammoth Mountain offered local kids. She went to the Thacher School, a coeducational boarding school near Ojai for high school, where she learned back-country skiing.

“I’ve always loved snow,” she said recently. “I think I’ve loved skiing from the first time I tried it on downhill skis.”

Never into competitive sports as a youth, Konrad nevertheless has the intensity and ability to focus on a goal that took her to the top of two different sports.

“It is just a part of my nature, not something that I have to work to generate,” she said.

She taught telemark skiing, a downhill form of cross-country skiing, as an undergrad at Dartmouth and during the winter of her junior year at Sun Valley, Idaho. She tried skate skiing at Sun Valley and surprised herself by doing it very well in a local race that included Alpine skiing, telemarking and cross-country.

When she returned to Dartmouth in 1988 for her senior year, she joined the college’s excellent ski program and learned to race on skate skis.

She dabbled in the sport for the next 10 years, fitting in the occasional recreational race while she studied geology and led backpacking and mountaineering trips in the wilderness of Wyoming, Washington, Utah and Patagonia for the National Outdoor Leadership School.

In 1997, Konrad got her master’s degree in geology at the University of Washington, then got serious about her athletic potential.

In 1998, she won two golds and two silvers at the Masters World Cup in Lake Placid, N.Y., an event for those over 30. In 1999, she was the ninth-ranked U.S. woman cross-country skier. And in 2000, with an eye on making the Olympic team for the Salt Lake City Games, she placed second in the national championships. But she did not make the team.

“I was on the bubble,” she said, and another woman was picked ahead of her. The cross-country rankings took into account a skier’s performance in skate races, classic races and sprints. Konrad excels at the longer skate races, but does not fare as well in the other races.

Disappointed at not making the Salt Lake team, she pondered her options.

“I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to get myself off the bubble and assure myself a spot on the cross-country team,” she said.

The U.S. Ski team decided not to assemble a women’s team after the Salt Lake Games, and Konrad focused on other things.

She got her Ph.D. in geology at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, where she still lives with her boyfriend. She hurt her knee and took to training on a bicycle. She joined the college team and in 2001 won three national collegiate cycling titles. She felt more fit than ever.

Still harboring Olympic aspirations but unsure of her future with the U.S. cross-country program, and despite her inexperience with firearms, she called the biathlon team. “Biathlon welcomed me with open arms,” she said.

Konrad is not a natural shooter and learning was a struggle. It is one thing she cannot do better by trying harder, she said.

“I’ve always felt strong and talented skiing,” she said. “Biathlon has been a different story. It is the first sport where I [struggled] when I started and finished races in last place.

“That’s not at all what I expected from biathlon before I started it. I thought, ‘I can ski. I just have to learn how to shoot.’ But no, you have to learn to be a Zen master,” she said.

Konrad carried hope all through the biathlon trials. Hope that if she did not make the biathlon team, she might still be named to the Olympic cross-country team.

“I think it took some of the pressure off me at trials, knowing I still had a chance at cross-country,” she said.

The team selection process is very different for the two sports. With few exceptions, the biathlon team is chosen solely on results from the four-race trials. In cross-country, points are accumulated all year. Konrad had made biathlon a priority, but raced often enough in cross-country races to be a contender. The cross-over kept her busy.

In early December, for instance, she won a biathlon in West Yellowstone, Mont., then hopped in her car and drove a dozen hours to Canmore, Canada, where she was the first American to cross the finish line at a World Cup cross-country race. That finish earned Konrad important points and reminded the cross-country selection committee that she was the fastest woman on skate skis in the country.

On Jan. 3, Konrad finished ninth in the last of the four races at biathlon trials. She had won the day before and other women who had skied well at the start of the trials had not done well toward the end.

Competitors gathered in a lodge above the shooting range in Maine, and after a brief period of nail biting, the five-woman team was announced. Steer led the way, but Konrad made it too. Tracy and Lanny Barnes, twins from Durango, Colo., and Carolyn Treacy, a Dartmouth student from Duluth, Minn., rounded out the team.

With less fanfare two weeks later, the cross-country ski team was announced on the Internet. Konrad made that team too.

Already in Italy to compete with the biathlon team, Konrad said she was thrilled to have exceeded her own expectations.

Had she ever set her sights on making both teams? “No!” she said.

She is the first American woman to be named to two teams for the same Winter Games.

According to Bill Mallon, a historian with the International Olympic Committee, in all the Winter Olympics, only 70 athletes have been named to two teams for the same Games, only four of them women, and they, like Konrad, cross-country skiers and biathletes.

These days there are too many talented athletes in most large countries for generalists to succeed, Mallon said.

Those who do emerge tend to be from smaller countries where one great athlete may fill spots on several teams. In all, Winter Games and Summer, 237 athletes have been named to two teams at an Olympics, Mallon said.

Soon, Konrad will raise that number to 238.

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Nadia White has been a reporter and editor for newspapers in Wyoming and Colorado since 1992. She is writing a book about brucellosis, an infectious disease passed from animals to humans, and reporting occasionally on athletes and other wildlife from Missoula, Mont.