From the start line to the coaching track
One of the most decorated biathletes in the history of the sport will be passing on his knowledge from a different position this week. Johannes Thingnes Bø, who retired from competition in March 2025 after accumulating five Olympic gold medals and six World Cup overall titles, travels to Vuokatti, Finland on Thursday to lead a youth training camp for athletes under the age of 17. The session runs through July 26 and represents one of the most visible appearances by the Norwegian legend in a coaching capacity since stepping away from racing.
A programme in generational transition
The Vuokatti camp arrives as Norway's biathlon programme navigates its most significant changing of the guard in over a decade. Bø and his older brother Tarjei Bø — the 2010–11 World Cup overall champion — both retired at the end of the 2024–25 season, closing a combined chapter of Norwegian dominance that shaped the competitive landscape of the sport for years. Their absence from the start lists was felt immediately at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina, where Norway competed without either of them for the first time in a generation.
Leading the next phase is Sturla Holm Lægreid, 27, who emerged as the squad's most prominent performer in Milan, winning a bronze medal in the men's 10 km sprint — his second Olympic bronze. Around him in the national programme are Johannes Dale-Skjevdal, Vetle Sjaastad Christiansen, Martin Uldal, and Vebjoern Soerum, all of whom have demonstrated the capacity to challenge the top of the World Cup field on their best days.
Summer preparation taking shape
The Norwegian national squad gathers for a domestic training camp in Sandnes from July 31 to August 6 — the first significant pre-season block. Three altitude training camps in Italy are scheduled later in the year, designed to sharpen the aerobic capacity that the ski-and-shoot format demands under race intensity.
The preparation structure reflects both continuity and clear ambition. Norway's biathlon programme has long maintained one of the most systematic athlete-development pathways in the sport, and the investment now channelled into the next generation carries the same methodical logic. Thingnes Bø's decision to engage in a junior camp just nine days before the squad's formal pre-season begins underlines how closely the generations remain linked within the Norwegian system.
The weight of expectation
At their collective peak, the Bø brothers made Norwegian dominance feel almost structural — a standing assumption about where medals would land at any major championship. Johannes Thingnes Bø alone won the World Cup overall title in six of the seven seasons preceding his retirement, a run of consistency that had no equivalent anywhere in the sport. Replacing that standard requires the current squad to reach new individual heights with a consistency they have not yet been asked to sustain across a full season of pressure.
Lægreid's Olympic bronze in Milan demonstrated that the squad's ceiling is genuinely world-class. Whether it can produce that level repeatedly — across World Cup weekends, championship rounds, and relay anchors — is the open question that will define the post-Bø era. Norway's first competitive answers come this autumn; the groundwork starts in Sandnes on July 31.