Pierre Beaudry is hoping the prediction of a La Nina winter for B.C. will hold true.
After two years of mild weather in the winter months with below-average snowfalls caused by warm sea surface temperatures brought on by the El Nino effect, forecasters are already noticing below-normal coastal water temperatures. If that continues in December and January, it likely will result in colder weather and more snow for Prince George.
As chief of competition for the 2017 Canadian National and North American biathlon championships, Beaudry wants to see the trails at Otway Nordic Centre buried in white stuff for the six-day event, March 6-12, 2017. With as many as 200 athletes from Canada and the United States expected, the last thing Beaudry and the host Caledonia Nordic Ski Club want to have to worry about is a lack of snow.
"We haven't had snow in the first week of March the last couple years - we barely made it through Canada Winter Games and we barely made it through February last year," said Beaudry. "The national championships is always the end-of-the-year event. It has to be at the end of the season because if you had it in February nobody would come because they would be busy with their own provincial competitions or they would be racing in Europe."
Club members were busy last weekend repainting the targets and cleaning up the stadium area around the range. The courses are mapped out, race schedules have been posted, hotel, food and travel arrangements have been and athlete registration details have been finalized.
Other than the weather, the one aspect of staging the event that is worrisome to Beaudry is a shortage of volunteers. Because it is a midweek event which runs through the following weekend, that makes it more difficult to line up the working crowd to help staff the competition.
"Volunteers are a big deal and we need a lot of them to run the range and the course," said Beaudry. "We have a helluva team to run the competition, we know exactly what we're doing, we have the facility to do it and the logistics are already organized, but we're short of the volunteers. We need about 100 or 120."
Information on how to volunteer is available on the website www.pgnationals2017.org.
Last weekend the club hosted an introduction to biathlon clinic to try to attract youths and adults to the sport. The main purpose of the one-day clinic was to teach safety procedures on the rifle range and familiarize the participants with the lightweight biathlon rifles. Six of the 18 were adults.
The quality of the Otway range, built for the 2015 Canada Winter Games, and the success of the Caledonia club in developing national- and internatonal-calibre biathletes Megan Tandy, Sarah Beaudry, Emily Dickson and Matt Neumann has helped raised the profile of the sport locally.
The shooting range is no longer tucked away in the forest a long ski away from the lodge, and that makes biathlon more appealing, especially for young athletes.
"We have lights on the range now and before we did it virtually by flashlight," said Pierre Beaudry. "For the kids it's not so miserable because they can go in a warm up if they want. But we made them tougher back then, now they're spoiled."
The Caledonia club has 32 biathletes enrolled in its Junior Racers and Biathlon Bears programs. While club head coach Graeme Moore is back to teach the ski racing aspect of biathlon and cross country, the club is currently without a full-time biathlon coach and is actively seeking a replacement for Allie Dickson, who left the city to enroll in business program in Vancouver.
"The club has been advertising the position for three months and we had someone 99.9 per cent lined up but they backed out at the last minute," said Pierre Beaudry.
On the international scene, Tandy and Sarah Beaudry are in good position to make it to the 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea and their chances are even better now that two female national team members, Audrey Vaillancourt and Zina Kocher, have retired from the sport. Tandy, 28, is gearing up for her shot at competing in a third-straight Olympics, while it would be the 21-year-old Beaudry's first. They took part in a national team training camp in July in New Zealand.
