The Biathlon World Cup has continued in Czech Nove Mesto.
The eighth stage was opened by the last women's relay of the season.
She gave the Russian national team a chance not only to rehabilitate for an unsuccessful performance at the World Cup, where the girls for the second time in a row could not win a single medal, but also to tighten their positions in the Cup of Nations - there, with the Russians for the fifth position, giving six quotas for the Olympic season , Belarus is fighting.
After the primacy of the planet, women's biathlon suffered some losses.
The German Denise Herrmann, who helped her team win silver in Pokljuka, the Swede Johanna Scottheim and the Frenchwoman Anais Chevalier-Boucher, refused to participate in the relay.
The Russian team had the same athletes in the cage that they played at the World Championships, but after the 11th place in the relay, the changes in the four were clearly obvious.
In Nove Mesto, the coaches decided to test Ulyana Kaisheva, who usually plays the role of the finisher, at the first stage.
Tatyana Akimova and Evgenia Pavlova were replaced by Irina Kazakevich and Larisa Kuklina.
Svetlana Mironova was supposed to finish the race.
Kaisheva was required, first of all, to stay in the general group and not create problems for Kazakevich, which was quite within her power - most of the teams left their fastest athletes for later stages.
As the race showed, the 26-year-old biathlete was indeed quite competitive at a distance and was only 13 seconds behind the fastest participant Ingrid Tandrevold from Norway.
However, it was not possible to avoid lagging behind the leaders.
Kaisheva first made one mistake on the prone, and then two more on the rack.
The Russian finished her stage in eighth place, 18 seconds behind the Norwegians.
Almost as much she lost to teams that were in the intermediate three.
At the second stage Kazakevich had more titled rivals - the Belarusian Dinara Alimbekova was right in front of her, and the Swede Hannah Eberg was behind her.
Against their background, the Russian woman was already running quite modestly, and a miss with the last shot on a prone and completely threw her to ninth place with an 11-second lag from her closest rival.
Kazakevich needed three additional rounds at the stand, and only when she managed to close all the targets with them, she returned to the track, losing for almost a minute to Norwegian Tiril Eckhoff.
Before Kazakevich passed the baton to Kuklina on the tenth, a curious incident occurred with the Ukrainian national team.
Yulia Dzhima, who closed the top three, could not touch Anastasia Merkushina from the first attempt to finish her stage.
She still touched her partner, but already outside the relay transfer zone.
The current world championship bronze medalists continued to compete, but now they had to wait for the decision of the judges, who had reason to disqualify the entire team.
Kuklina began her stage quite measuredly, not trying to get involved in wrestling at a distance.
But on the firing lines, she showed herself perfectly.
She hit all the targets in the first shooting, while all the opponents in front of her, except for the American Claire Egan, made mistakes.
Merkushina and Frenchwoman Chloe Chevalier even entered the penalty loop and missed Kuklina in sixth place.
She began to lose to the top three, which included the national teams of Norway, Belarus and the United States, only 23 seconds.
The stance was just as perfect for the Russian biathlete.
Again, all five rounds hit the target.
Due to the fact that the leading Norwegian Ida Lin now went to the penalty loop, Kuklina was already on the fifth line.
She was separated from the potential podium by only 14 seconds.
But the last round of the Russian woman went much worse than the first two.
The gap had already increased to half a minute, and at the same time, before the transfer of the relay, Lin and Chevalier walked around it.
Mironova was one of the fastest biathletes in the world championship, but did not show her usual speeds in Nove Mesto.
It did not work for her and to please with high-quality shooting.
The first two misses deprived the Russian national team of chances for medals, and after two misfires on the Mironov stand, they dropped to eighth place.
Only the disqualification of the Ukrainian national team would help to climb one line higher.
But if immediately after the finish it entered into force, then after some time it was canceled.
The victory was won by the Swedish girls, who won only 1.2 seconds over the Belarusian women - thanks to the Scandinavians, Russia remained in fifth place in the women's Cup of Nations.
Bronze medals went to French women.
On March 5, the men's relay will take place in Nove Mesto, where the Russian team, which became the bronze medalist of the World Championship this year, will try to compete for medals.
Sweden win the final women relay of the season - and the discipline globe!
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🥈 🇧🇾 Belarus
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- IBU World Cup (@IBU_WC) March 4, 2021