Cross-country skiing is a pure endurance sport: you push as hard as you can the whole time. Biathlon adds rifle shooting. Not as a break, not as a reward: as an additional demand on a body that is already working at its limit. You ski hard, stop at a range, raise a rifle while your heart is still hammering, and try to hit a target the size of a small plate from 10 meters. Miss, and you ski a penalty loop before continuing. Then you go back to skiing hard and do the whole thing again.

Para biathlon runs on the same framework, and if you watch it without knowing the shooting rules, you will spend the broadcast confused about why the leader keeps disappearing while someone behind them catches up. The shooting is not decorative. It is the mechanism that produces the results.

Competition runs at the Biathlon Arena Cortina d'Ampezzo from March 7 through 12. Here is what to know before you tune in.

How the Sport Works

At each shooting stage, athletes ski to the range, stop at their assigned lane, and fire at five targets. Para biathlon uses laser-scoring air rifles rather than conventional rounds: the rifles fire a laser beam at electronic sensors on the target plate, which register hits instantly. No live ammunition is involved.

A clean stage, all five targets down, means the athlete continues directly back onto the course. Each miss sends them to the penalty loop, a 150-meter circuit around the outside of the range that must be completed before they can rejoin the race. One miss costs one loop. Two misses costs two.

The distance those 150 meters represents is what makes biathlon strategy interesting. An athlete who pushes their skiing pace too hard may arrive at the range with a heart rate so elevated that their hands are shaking, miss twice, and exit 300 meters behind where they entered. An athlete who skis more conservatively but hits everything can pass multiple competitors without any of them seeing it coming. You are watching two sports happen simultaneously, and the leaderboard at the finish line is the sum of both.

The Events

Short distance runs 7.5 kilometers for sitting athletes and 10 kilometers for standing, with two shooting stages. If you are new to this sport and want one event that shows you how the whole thing works, this is the one. The course is compact enough that you can follow every exchange in real time: you see the athletes leave the range, you see the penalty loops happen, and you watch a clean shooter climb the standings while skiers who pushed too hard pay for it. There is no long stretch where the positions quietly rearrange while you are not looking.

Middle distance extends both the skiing distance and the number of shooting stages. It rewards athletes who can manage their output across the full race, not just the first loop, because mistakes compound. An athlete who goes hard early and shoots poorly at stage two will be carrying that penalty through every remaining kilometer. This is the event that separates athletes who can execute under fatigue from those who are merely fast.

The relay sends four athletes in sequence, each completing a leg with skiing and shooting. Watching the relay's last leg, when the anchor arrives at the range with the team's position on the line, gives you the most concentrated version of what makes biathlon strategy interesting. One steady athlete at the range can recover whatever the first three legs gave away.

How the Categories Work

Para biathlon competes across three groups: standing, sitting, and visually impaired.

Standing athletes are classified under LW2 through LW9, covering lower and upper limb impairments. The range inside this category is wide: an athlete missing one hand and an athlete with a significant leg impairment both compete here, each skiing and shooting with technique adapted to their specific classification. The classification system accounts for those differences, so results reflect athletic performance rather than degree of impairment.

Sitting athletes are classified under LW10 through LW12 and compete in a sit-ski. At the shooting range, they set up on a mat using a bipod: a two-legged support attached to the rifle's forend that rests on the ground. Here is what makes the sitting category's shooting stages worth watching carefully: they cannot plant their feet. Standing athletes have leg contact with the ground through their skis and boots, which means their stability base includes their whole body. Sitting athletes have the mat, the bipod, and whatever they can hold through their core and arms. The athletes competing in this category have trained specifically to find steadiness from that position, and watching a sitting biathlete drop a clean set of five targets on a first-time broadcast is a small revelation about what trained precision looks like.

Visually impaired athletes navigate the course with a guide skier running ahead and compete at the range using an acoustic targeting system. A tone played through earphones shifts pitch as the athlete aligns the rifle, rising toward center and registering a clean hit through a distinct signal. These athletes shoot independently, from audio feedback alone, which is another detail that tends to reframe what a first-time viewer thinks of as the sport's already-demanding requirements.

All three groups can race in the same start. Results and medals are tracked separately within each category.

The Athletes to Follow

Kendall Gretsch is the defending para biathlon champion, comes to Cortina after winning three golds at the 2025 World Championships, and is competing at her fifth Games. In the sitting events, she is the standard the rest of the field is measured against. If you want to see what clean technique and composed range work look like together, Gretsch's shooting stages give you that picture better than any analyst's description.

Oksana Masters spent the full 2024-25 season away from competition after a leg infection, returning just ahead of these Games. She is targeting the biathlon and cross-country events at her fifth Winter Games, carrying 17 Paralympic medals across Summer and Winter sports into the competition. Her 2022 Beijing biathlon performance was the best of her winter career, and watching how her range work holds after a long absence is one of the more genuinely compelling storylines in the Nordic program this cycle.

Where to Watch

All biathlon events at Cortina stream on Peacock, with the full schedule at Olympics.com.

Start with the short-distance events in the first half of the competition window. The races are compact, the penalty loops are immediate and visible, and the sport's mechanics reveal themselves fast enough that you will have a clear picture of how the leaderboard is built before the race is done. By the time the middle-distance events arrive, you will already be watching the range the way the athletes are: as the part of the race where positions get decided.