Family first, career second.
Megan Tandy knows she's made the right choice to retire from biathlon after 12 years with the national team.
The 30-year-old three-time Olympian from Prince George informed Biathlon Canada of her decision a few weeks ago after she learned she will have full custody of her eight-year-old son Predo indefinitely.
Based in Klingenthal, Germany, Tandy's family situation unexpectedly changed earlier this month when her ex-husband Illmar Heinicke, Predo's father, became institutionalized, unable to provide parental care for his son while Tandy was away racing.
"I decided for family reasons to stop racing," said Tandy, from her home in Germany. "There's no way forward from there. If I don't race World Cup in January then there's no opportunity to qualify for the North American World Cups (next month in Canmore and Salt Lake City) and without participating in those races there was no opportunity to qualify for world championships. "It was kind of a make-or-break part of the season."
Tandy, who lives in Klingenthal with her partner Domenik Wolf and his nine-year-old son Leni, was unable to shed much light on that's happened to Heinicke, who, up until last year, was coaching in Germany's junior national program.
Heinicke, 46, first met Tandy in 2006, when he moved to Prince George to replace Knut Tore Berland as B.C. provincial biathlon team coach. They moved to Germany in 2010 and separated in September 2014 after four years of marriage.
"He's, for personal reasons, in treatment and not able to be present here for a longer period of time," Tandy said. "I couldn't tell you if it's for stress or for a medical condition or for drug addiction, it could literally be anything.
"I can't tell you that much because I don't know that much, it's a pretty tough situation I have over here," she said. "I have my son and we've been through multiple custody battles and we don't have great communication (with Heinicke) but it became apparent in November that Ilmar was going to be away for an extended period of time and unable to be at his home in Klingenthal at all.
"So at that point I decided to end my season to be home with Predo, he's my priority. It's been a super-rough transition from planning how to progress my season to being a full-time mom but that's OK, I'm enjoying it. Predo has always come first but I've never had a custody situation where I could be a full-time mom. Now that opportunity is presenting itself and it's more important for me to be there for him during that time period than to be racing."
Tandy started the season on the World Cup team after winning the Canadian team trials in November but her ski times in those first few World Cup events fell short of expectations. Biathlon Canada informed her just before the new year she was being dropped down to the IBU Cup international B circuit, replaced on the World Cup team by Megan Bankes of Calgary.
Tandy was coming off a disappointing a 2017-18 season leading up to the 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang. She made the Olympic team and qualified for the pursuit after racing the sprint but a viral illness caused her heart muscle to shrink and that forced her to give up her spot on the team to Sarah Beaudry of Prince George for the rest of the Olympic competition.
Tandy did not race the final World Cup events last winter. Once she learned what was causing her to feel so fatigued and began responding to treatment she decided to extend her career for one more season.
"It was a crazy year, I started in the worst shape I've probably ever been with major health problems and then had one of the best summer and fall training seasons ever," said Tandy.
"I was feeling totally stoked for the season, really excited to win Canadian trials and I couldn't have started in any better way but I overdid it after trials. I was a little bit too motivated. I was willing to take the risk (training all-out). I wanted to be in the top-15, I didn't want to train to be 50th if I'm looking at this as my last race season."
Tandy's World Cup results to close out 2018 were among the worst of her career. In Pokljuka, Slovenia she was 62nd in the individual event and 73rd in the sprint. In Hochfilzen, Austria she finished 87th in the sprint and in Nove Mesto, Czech Republic she was 81st in the sprint.
"The ski speed just wasn't there and it was so frustrating," she said.
Tandy first took up biathlon when she was 12, just starting to find her racing stride as a junior team cross-country ski racer with the Caledonia Nordic Ski Club in Prince George. She joined as one of the pioneers of a junior biathlon program overseen by volunteer coaches Jeremy Campbell and Fiona Coy. Working on a shooting range at Otway Nordic Centre they had tucked in the woods, using a snowmobile to haul in lights and other equipment, they trained young gunners like Tandy to become provincial champions. On her first try on the shooting range, using a rest in prone position, Tandy went 5-for-5 and was immediately hooked.
She was 22 when she first competed in the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver-Whistler, where her best result was 35th in the pursuit. Her greatest Olympic moment came in Sochi in 2014 in the women's team relay, where Tandy, skiing third in the order, was flawless in two shooting bouts, nailing all 10 targets without a miss. She tagged anchor skier Zina Kocher with the team in fourth place and the Canadian team finished an all-time best eighth - just enough to secure athlete assistance national funding for the entire relay team for the following season.
Tandy followed up her impressive Olympic performance with her best season on the World Cup tour. In 2014-15 she posted five top-16 solo race results and had five top-11 team relay finishes.
"I never made it in the top-six, was never on the podium but I was really consistent, shooting well and skiing consistently," she said. "I had two 20-for-20 races in that season, one was an individual where I placed (a career-best) 11th and one was a pursuit where I raced from 41st position up to 14th. There were weekends where I felt I couldn't miss a target and it was a cool place to be."
Based in Germany the past eight years, Tandy had to adapt to training on her own, apart from her teammates. She had planned to retire after the 2018 Olympics but was encouraged by her cardiologist to try come back for her "bonus season" when he explained to her how remarkable it was she was able to compete at all last season considering her compromised circulatory capacity caused by the viral condition.
Unlike their European counterparts, who are well taken care of financially, government funding for Canadian biathletes is always uncertain from year to year because it is performance based. Tandy won't miss that aspect of being on the team.
"The IBU Cup team (which includes Burns Lake native Emily Dickson), they're paying thousands of dollars every year to represent Canada on our international development circuit," said Tandy. "It's the hardest for our development athletes between 17 and 22 - they're the future of our sport and yet if they're not able to deliver exceptional results at that age that qualify them for federal athlete funding they're really on their own.'
Tandy is encouraged to see the next generation of Canadian biathletes coming up in the world rankings. Two of the current national team members - Beaudry and Dickson - are products of the Caledonia club.
"Sarah impresses me, she's a really positive person and it's cool to watch her develop and grow up as an athlete a few years behind me," Tandy said. "She's super positive. She had to drop one of her races at trials and had the guts to put all her eggs in one basket. She started the season on IBU Cup and by the third World Cup she had a personal best by far with a near-perfect race and a 12th place finish. She has lots of potential.
"Emily was definitely skiing faster this year and her times behind the top six athletes at trials wasn't as much. In previous years that gap was minutes and this year it's really closed and that's exciting to see. For sure, there's some ski speed improvements needed for international results but there's time for that."
Tandy plans to spend the next few months completing her business administration masters thesis in sport management and is about to begin a new job as sport manager of a new biathlon club program set up by GK Software, the company that's backed Tandy as her major sponsor the past two years. Over the next month she will help plan the club's project to build an air rifle range in Schoneck, near Klingenthal.
"I'm really looking forward to stepping into a whole different set of shoes in the biathlon world," said Tandy. "It's pretty cool to step out of the sport and have something waiting for me right at home."
Tandy is fluent in German and plans to utilize her extensive biathlon connections to help with her latest venture.
"It's been pretty incredible, the sport has been my career for my entire adult life, I've spent the last 12 years pursuing it professionally," she said. "It's been a constant in my life when I've had in my private world lots of tough things going on. It's taken me through a lot of highs and lows on and off the race course and I have no regrets. I'm so thankful I was able to represent Canada for so many years and I had so much support from different sponsors and family but also from home in Prince George the positive vibes from start to finish.
"It wasn't a moment I would have chosen for myself with the family situation just to step out of the sport abruptly, but at the same point I'm ready for it. I want to be able to watch biathlon races on the weekend and see the Canadians fighting for it. It's good to have the next tier of girls coming up and being ready to fill the shoes of the athletes who are retiring."
Tandy is the second high-profile Canadian biathlete in the past two months to call it a career. Nathan Smith of Calgary, the country's most decorated male biathlete, announced in December he was retiring after two years of dealing with a cytomegalovirus, an energy-sapping disease. Smith made a name for himself internationally when he won silver in the sprint at the 2012 world championships and later that season won World Cup gold in the pursuit.
"When I look back I'm so thankful for everything the sport has given me, it taught me so much about self-confidence, about falling down and getting up, about perseverance and teamwork and trust in others as well as trust in myself," Tandy said. "This journey has given me so much I'm excited about potentially stepping into a different role where I can help give everything the sport gave to me to the next generation of athletes, whether that's in Canada, Germany or somewhere else in the world."
