During the Milan-Cortina Olympics, the French biathlon team is aiming for a historic harvest of medals which it hopes to launch from Sunday's mixed relay. In three decades, this "military and customs officer's sport" has emerged from the shadows thanks in particular to the impact of Martin Fourcade to become the main supplier of charms for the French.

Published on: 02/07/2026 - 2:47 p.m.

For France, in terms of biathlon, the question is not "if" but "how many medals" will the delegation of French biathletes bring back from the Milan-Cortina Olympics? Because, if since 2006, France in the Winter Olympics has remained in the top 10 in the medal table, it is largely thanks to this discipline, the locomotive of French winter Olympism.

In 2022, during the Beijing Games, the French biathletes brought home seven, with a quintuple for Quentin Fillon Maillet, including two coronations (individual and pursuit). And since the last Olympics, "QFM" in 2022 and Julia Simon in 2023 have each won the big crystal globe, a trophy awarded to the winner of the World Cup, and historic raids have been made at the worlds in 2024 and 2025 - 13 medals including 6 titles at each edition.

Albertville 1992, starting line of the French biathlon

Before getting there, French biathlon started from nothing, from total anonymity: "At the time, those who do biathlon were the losers in cross-country skiing. It's those who aren't going fast enough who are trying to make a career in it", says Florence Baverel, 2006 Olympic champion, with a smile in the documentary "Biathlon, a History of France".

And it was women who led the way. At the time, the sport only had seven licensees in France. However, in Les Saisies, during the Albertville Olympics in 1992, in front of a stunned nation discovering this strange sport, Corinne Niogret, Véronique Claudel and Anne Briand offered France the first Olympic gold medal in its history in biathlon.

"It's the tipping point. The fact that biathlon won a gold medal at the Games in France, it brought biathlon out of anonymity. Everyone now knew what biathlon was", recalls the former French shooting coach Siegfried Mazet, in the same documentary.

Raphaël Poirée, the first champion

That's the trigger. Two years later, in Lillehammer, during the 1994 Olympic Games, French biathlon doubled the stakes in terms of number of medals. The following year, during the Antholz-Anterselva world championships, France found itself at the top of the medal rankings for the first time. The start of impressive consistency in the discipline, with the exception of very rare slumps like the 1998 Nagano Olympics where the French delegation left empty-handed.

The Albertville click will be followed by another. His name? Raphaël Poirée. At the beginning of the 2000s, he emerged as the great French champion and carved out one of the richest records in the discipline: four large crystal globes (2000, 2001, 2002, 2004), 10 small and eight world champion titles...

“Raphaël Poirée took the biathlon to the next level. He showed that there was no need to be German or Norwegian to win. He was the first to compete with them in ski time,” remembers Loïs Habert, former biathlete, consultant on Eurosport. "We had a mental block. We didn't think we could do as well as them and he showed the opposite."

Despite Raphaël Poirée's immense status within biathlon, he will never win the Olympic title, the only gap in his career. In 2006, in Turin, the honor will go to the outsiders Vincent Defrasne and Florence Baverel-Robert. But between these two exploits and the immense prize list of Raphaël Poirée, the love story begins between the French public and the discipline worthy of an action film.

Martin Fourcade, the giant

Martin Fourcade took over from Raphaël Poirée in the early 2010s and propelled interest in biathlon in France to another dimension. For his incredible record, his undivided domination and his commitments outside of biathlon, the Catalan has become one of the greatest French athletes in history.

His track record is extraordinary: seven large consecutive crystal globes between 2012 and 2018 (26 in total), 83 World Cup victories (double that of his elder Raphaël Poirée), eleven world titles and six Olympic titles: a first gold medal won in Sochi in 2014, the next four in PyeongChang in 2018 and a sixth recovered on the green carpet after disqualification for doping of Yevgeny Oustiougov who finished ahead of him in 2010.

Enough to create a “Fourcademania” in France. He has long been considered one of the French's favorite athletes. In 2014, the French Ski Federation (FFS) had only 350 competitive licensees and around 5,000 participants. In 2020, when the giant retired, there were 750 competitive licensees and 20,000 practitioners across France.

And beyond his individual victories, Martin Fourcade united the French team around him, where Raphael Poirée was more solitary. Inspired by their elder, the next generation is being built in his shadow, like Quentin Fillon Maillet and Émilien Jacquelin. Enough to avoid a post-Fourcade void.

The impact of unencrypted broadcasting in France

And in addition to winning everything, Martin Fourcade will do everything to make his sport popular: "It's fundamental work to interest the media in our sport. We had to attract attention to biathlon", explains the person concerned in the documentary "Biathlon, a history of France".

With an extraterrestrial who has a string of performances and breaks records in his discipline, it is often easier to bring back media. In 2016, the purchase of broadcast rights by the Équipe channel was a key date. Since that year, the biathlon has been broadcast in full and unencrypted on French TV.

It must be said that biathlon ticks a lot of boxes to be a telegenic product. Shooting on skis, the principle is spectacular and worthy of an opening scene from a James Bond film. The races are rather short. And the actions are crystal clear for the layman to decipher.

Easy-to-watch sport, French people who perform and free broadcasting… The virtuous circle is in place. Success is immediate. On the last season in 2025, the L'Équipe channel boasted an average of one million viewers. There should be even more of them during the Olympics to admire the exploits of Quentin Fillon Maillet and Julia Simon as well as the dense succession that is emerging, Lou Jeanmonnot and Éric Perrot, inspired by these seniors whom they saw winning everything on TV.

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