In Jakuszyce, Poland, in January 2026, Josh Sweeney skied 7.5 kilometers in the sitting position, stopped at the shooting range, raised his rifle, and came away with a silver medal in the men's sitting biathlon at the final World Cup of the season. Three months to go before the 2026 Winter Paralympics.

Two things make that silver medal particularly interesting. Sweeney has already won a Paralympic gold medal, in a different sport, at a different Games. And before any of that, he was a United States Marine Corps Scout Sniper.

He is 38, and this will be his third Paralympic Games in three different sports.

The Goal That Won Sochi

On March 15, 2014, the United States and Russia played for the gold medal in sled hockey at the Sochi Paralympics. The game ended 1-0. Sweeney scored the only goal, putting the shot high and just over Russian goalie Vladimir Kamantcev. Team USA became the first program to win back-to-back Paralympic gold medals in the sport, and Sweeney received the inaugural Pat Tillman Award for Service at that summer's ESPYs.

Four years before that gold medal, Sweeney had been a Marine Corps Scout Sniper deployed with the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines in Nowzad, Afghanistan. On October 28, 2009, he stepped on an IED. He lost both legs above the knee and waited two hours for evacuation. He received a Purple Heart for his service.

The path from that morning in Nowzad to scoring the goal that won a Paralympic gold medal took him through competitive ice hockey, years of rehabilitation, and a competitive drive he describes simply: "I just love competing, whether it's against other people or myself, and doing challenges that I don't know if I can accomplish."

From the Ice to the Biathlon Range

After Sochi, Sweeney moved on from sled hockey. Family life pulled him in a different direction, and the physical demands of competing at the international level in para ice hockey were difficult to sustain. He turned to paratriathlon, earned a Level 2 coaching certification from USA Triathlon, and discovered cross-country sit-skiing in Idaho, where he had settled. That path took him to Beijing 2022, where he finished 16th in the 18km sitting para cross-country event.

Between Beijing and Milan, he made a move that looks obvious in hindsight: he added the rifle.

If you've ever watched biathlon and wondered why some athletes look completely composed at the range while others are still fighting their own cardiovascular system, the answer is that settling from sprint intensity to shooting precision is its own skill set. Each missed shot adds penalty time, and the margin between the podium and the middle of the field often comes down to a few seconds and whether the shooter can control their breathing fast enough to put rounds on target.

Sweeney spent years as a Scout Sniper. Controlled breathing and trigger discipline under pressure were not supplemental skills in that role: they were the job. At the biathlon range, they are the job too. His transition wasn't automatic. His skiing needed to be faster before the combination made sense; arriving at the range too exhausted to shoot straight defeats the point. Building the aerobic engine without losing the marksmanship took time, and so did trusting that a skill set from a completely different context would hold up in competition. By January 2026, it was holding well enough for a World Cup silver medal.

March 7 at Tesero

Biathlon at the 2026 Winter Paralympics runs from March 7 through March 13 at the Tesero Cross-Country Skiing Stadium in Val di Fiemme. Sweeney competes in the men's sitting category. If you're watching the 2026 Paralympics and biathlon is new to you, his races are a good starting point: the scout sniper backstory gives you a concrete frame for what happens at the range, and watching how he handles the transition from skiing to shooting at competition speed is genuinely fascinating.

He is 38, at his third Games in his third sport. What he does with the rifle at Tesero starting March 7 is the thing to watch.