Tag: cross-country skiing

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U.S. Biathlon’s board votes Wednesday on a formal operating alliance with U.S. Ski & Snowboard. Supporters call it the stability the sport has always lacked. Skeptics call it a surrender of independence. Both are working from the same set of facts. Here is what the deal actually says, and what it would and would not change.

The U.S. Biathlon board of directors is scheduled to meet tomorrow, Wednesday, July 29, at 4 p.m. Eastern. This account is based on interviews conducted by FasterSkier with the chief executives of both organizations, a U.S. Biathlon athlete representative, the U.S. Biathlon head physiology coach, a written statement from the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee, and a review of the alliance term sheet, three community working-group reports, and correspondence circulated by members opposed to the deal. All of these documents were posted publicly by U.S. Biathlon or provided to FasterSkier.

Every winter, for a few weeks in February, cross-country skiing and biathlon stop being niche pursuits in the United States. During the last Olympic period, FasterSkier drew more than 180,000 unique readers in a single February, most of them people who do not know the sport’s governance history and have never heard of the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act. On Wednesday afternoon, a board most of those readers could not name will vote on a decision that could reshape how one of their sports is run for the rest of the decade and beyond.

The question in front of the U.S. Biathlon board is whether to enter a “Strategic Operating Alliance” with U.S. Ski & Snowboard, the far larger national governing body that oversees Olympic and Paralympic skiing and snowboarding. Under the proposal, U.S. Biathlon would remain a legally separate organization and the recognized governing body for the sport, but would hand much of its day-to-day operation to U.S. Ski & Snowboard under a services agreement. To its architects, it is a way to give a chronically under-resourced sport the stability and commercial muscle it has never had. To its critics, it is the moment a proud, independent program stops steering its own ship.

The two sides do not disagree much about the facts. They disagree about what the facts mean.

What is actually being proposed

Strip away the temperature of the debate and the structure is specific, and it has changed meaningfully since the idea first surfaced publicly in the spring. The current terms, which U.S. Biathlon posted for its members on July 27, describe an alliance rather than a merger in the dictionary sense. No organization dissolves.

Under the agreement summary, U.S. Biathlon “will remain a separate legal entity,” keeping “its own corporate existence, financials, and independent audit.” It stays the governing body recognized by the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee under the Ted Stevens Act, and keeps its membership in the International Biathlon Union, the sport’s world federation. Its name, logo, and trademarks remain owned by U.S. Biathlon and are licensed to U.S. Ski & Snowboard.

What changes is who runs the operation. Under a services, or operating, agreement, U.S. Ski & Snowboard would take over “staffing, programs, events, and administration for biathlon,” giving the smaller sport access to a chief financial officer, general counsel, marketing and revenue staff, medical and sport-science support, and technology infrastructure it cannot afford on its own. U.S. Biathlon’s own staff, its leaders say, would remain responsible for running the sport itself. A new Biathlon Sport Committee would be created inside U.S. Ski & Snowboard, mirroring the structure the larger body already uses for cross-country and its other disciplines.

Jack Gierhart, U.S. Biathlon’s president and chief executive, described the mechanism plainly in an interview. “The mechanics of this are like an operating agreement between U.S. Biathlon and Ski and Snowboard where they take over operations,” he said. “That’s how we’re honoring and satisfying the Ted Stevens Act.”

Sophie Goldschmidt, president and chief executive of U.S. Ski & Snowboard, framed the same structure around what biathlon keeps. “We would keep the biathlon entity. In fact, we keep the biathlon name, the biathlon logo,” she told FasterSkier. “From a legal perspective, it would also have its own entity. With that, it would have its own board. So very much operating like it does today, but sitting within a larger framework so that it can benefit from the other resources and shared knowledge, extra funding that we can provide.”

That phrase, “operating like it does today,” sits at the center of the argument, because a great deal depends on how much a board that has delegated its operations still actually decides.

How the sport got here

By the account of the people who built it, this did not begin as a takeover. It began, Gierhart said, as an attempt to solve a problem every small Olympic sport shares.

Gierhart arrived at U.S. Biathlon in September 2022, as longtime leader Max Cobb was leaving for the IBU. The organization was early in a strategic plan aimed at growing the sport, and a central piece of that plan was working more closely with the cross-country community, since most American biathletes come from skiing. “From my experience being in sport for 25 years, when you offer people more options, more pathways, you increase retention and you grow the pie,” he said. “It’s like, this should be a no-brainer, but then you run into the cultures and communities.”

Those conversations, Gierhart said, drew in the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee, which oversees and funds the country’s Olympic sports. “The USOPC started to suggest, hey, we’ve got a lot of these small NGBs, why don’t you guys think about something a little more formal?” he said. That was roughly a year and a half ago. The organizations sketched the basic terms, paused through the Olympic and Paralympic Games so as not to distract athletes, then brought the concept to a wider audience in the spring.

Goldschmidt described the same arc and made the case for why her organization wants biathlon at all. U.S. Ski & Snowboard already runs multiple sports under one roof, she said, which means it can absorb the compliance and administrative costs that crush small governing bodies. “The central costs can really be absorbed and be a real cost saving for those organizations,” she said. “Legal, finance, safe sport compliance, all of that, which is quite a big burden, especially on some smaller NGBs. We can absorb that quite easily without having to increase the cost base, which means practically more money is going directly to the athletes.”

The rollout did not land smoothly. After town-hall meetings drew pointed questions, the two organizations convened three joint working groups, on governance, sport development, and high performance, that met through the back half of July. Twenty-eight to twenty-nine participants, including athletes, coaches, club leaders, and staff, spent two weeks documenting what a successful alliance would require and what worried them. Their reports, posted publicly, have become some of the most revealing documents in the whole debate, in part because they capture both the community’s hopes for closer collaboration and its doubts, in the community’s own words.

The money, and the question at the center of it

Almost everyone involved agrees that money is the engine of this deal. What they do not agree on is how to describe the pressure behind it.

The clearest number comes from Gierhart. For the coming season, he said, the USOPC reduced U.S. Biathlon’s grant by 22 percent. The reason, in his telling, has less to do with the alliance than with a shift in how the USOPC allocates money. Roughly three years ago, he said, the committee created an investment framework weighted toward medal potential. “They told us a couple of years ago, you guys are one of the highest funded sports, you haven’t delivered medals,” Gierhart said. “There’s a good probability you’re going to get a cut. And that’s what happened. They cut us,” a reduction he put at 22 percent for this year.

Crucially, Gierhart rejected the idea that the cut is a lever to force the alliance. “It hasn’t been like, if you don’t do it, we’re taking away money,” he said. “It was, we’re taking away money because you’re over-resourced from our model standpoint and you’re not delivering. But if you go in this direction, which we believe will be beneficial in the long term, we want to help you do that.” Asked directly in a later FasterSkier interview whether it was a threat, he drew the distinction again. “They gave us our grant for this year, and it’s the 22 percent reduction. But they said that if we move in this direction with this alliance, they want to invest more in us. And they will find a way to do that,” bringing biathlon “back to where we were.”

Goldschmidt, in interviews with FasterSkier, likewise described the reduction as reversible if the alliance proceeds, and tied it to the USOPC’s belief that a more efficient biathlon can compete for medals.

The U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee, asked to confirm the figures and to say whether restoration of the funding is contingent on the alliance being approved, declined to address specifics. In a written statement, spokesman Jon Mason said the committee “is aware of and engaged in the discussions between U.S. Biathlon and U.S. Ski & Snowboard, and we support them taking a deliberate, transparent, fact-based approach to exploring a future relationship that complies with the Ted Stevens Olympic & Amateur Sports Act.” The committee, he added, is “supportive of outcomes that can build long-term stability and create opportunities for current and future generations of athletes.” The statement did not confirm the size of the cut, and it framed compliance with the Act as a goal the parties must meet rather than a settled fact.

What the alliance would add is documented. According to the high-performance working group’s summary, biathlon “would receive a ~$600k increase from current FY27 revenue projections” in the first year, with U.S. Ski & Snowboard guaranteeing an increase “from this year-one level through year 4.” Gierhart put the combined total, new revenue and shared-services savings together, at “at least” $3.3 million over four years. That money, in principle, flows back into programs.

Set against U.S. Biathlon’s roughly $3.5 million in annual revenue, those are not small numbers. And they arrive alongside a promise that biathlon’s existing money stays biathlon’s. Under the agreement, “all funding designated for biathlon, including IBU and USOPC support, existing sponsorship contributions, charitable donations, and other biathlon-specific revenue, will remain ring-fenced and used exclusively to support biathlon.”

Here Goldschmidt was careful to correct what she called a misunderstanding. The ring-fence, she said, is permanent, not a four-year arrangement. “All of the money that they generate that is ring-fenced for biathlon will continue to go to that program. That will be a contractual commitment,” she said. “Some people have got confused that we’re only committing to four years to ring-fence and provide them funding. That’s not accurate.” The four-year commitment, she clarified, applies to the additional commercial funding U.S. Ski & Snowboard brings to the table, which depends on the sponsorship deals it can renew.

Gierhart described the same two-part structure, and pushed back on the idea that biathlon falls off a cliff when the four years are up. “This gives us a platform for four years of sort of guaranteed increased revenue to build momentum and to implement the things that we know are going to help us,” he said. “Without that, we’re going to live year to year, and we’re already in maintenance mode as opposed to growth mode.” In four years, he argued, biathlon would be “in no different a situation than we are today. In fact, we’ll be better, because we’ll have a lot more resources to work with over the next four years.”

That distinction defines exactly where the community’s deepest financial fear lives. The money biathlon already raises is protected by contract. The new money, the actual growth case, is guaranteed for one Olympic cycle, through 2030, and after that depends on the USOPC and on sponsors, the same as it would if biathlon stood alone.

The Ted Stevens question

No part of the debate has generated more heat than the law. A group of members, some of whom helped establish U.S. Biathlon as an independent governing body decades ago, argue that the alliance violates the Ted Stevens Act. Their case rests on two provisions.

The first is the single-federation rule. Under 36 U.S.C. 220522, a national governing body must be “a member of no more than one international sports federation that governs a sport included on the program of the Olympic Games.” U.S. Ski & Snowboard belongs to FIS, the International Ski and Snowboard Federation. Biathlon answers to the IBU. Critics contend that if U.S. Ski & Snowboard effectively governs an IBU sport, the arrangement collides with that rule.

The second is autonomy. The same statute requires a governing body to be autonomous, in that it “independently decides and controls all matters central to governance” and “does not delegate decision-making and control of matters central to governance.” Arthur Stegen, a former U.S. Biathlon board member and part of a group called Team Independent Biathlon, laid out the objection in correspondence circulated to other members and shared with FasterSkier: a services agreement that assigns operational responsibility to U.S. Ski & Snowboard, he argues, is by definition a delegation of control, and reducing the biathlon board to a sport committee “would appear to relinquish its governance responsibilities to another organization.” Stegen wrote that he is “completely against this potential merger.”

The written terms were plainly built to answer that challenge. The agreement summary includes a section titled “Reserved Governance Authorities,” which states that “notwithstanding any operational responsibilities delegated to U.S. Ski & Snowboard,” U.S. Biathlon “will retain sole authority over all matters required by the Ted Stevens Act or otherwise reserved to the National Governing Body,” including “oversight of the organization, approval of the biathlon budget, and all authorities reserved to the NGB.” In other words, the deal’s authors say operations are delegated while governance is reserved.

Goldschmidt said the structure was designed to align with the statute from the start. “We’ve worked with the USOPC and others to ensure it fits all of those criteria, which it does,” she said. Gierhart said U.S. Biathlon has already received an opinion on the point. “We’ve gotten the opinion from the USOPC’s legal counsel on the terms as they’re written now, and their opinion is that it meets the requirements and is in compliance with the Ted Stevens Act,” he said.

He was also clear about sequence, and described it as the normal way such deals come together. Wednesday’s vote is on the foundational terms, the fundamentals both sides have agreed to. “You’ve got to agree on the fundamentals, and then that’s what’s going to drive the detailed operating agreement,” he said. That more extensive agreement, covering licensing of the biathlon trademarks, the function of the board, and the bylaws, would be drafted next, “vetted by independent counsel” to confirm it complies with the Act, and then brought back to the U.S. Biathlon board, athlete representatives included, for a separate vote to approve it.

That staging is itself contested ground. Supporters see a standard process: agree on principles, then build and independently vet the detailed contract. Skeptics see a board being asked to commit before the full agreement exists and before the independent legal review happens, and some argue a binding vote should wait until both are done. What Wednesday’s vote actually authorizes, the concept or a finished deal, is a distinction worth watching closely as the meeting unfolds.

The USOPC, for its part, did not put its weight behind a declaration that the current structure is legal. It said it supports the parties “exploring a future relationship that complies” with the Act, language that leaves compliance as something still to be demonstrated.

There is precedent for the skepticism, and for U.S. Ski & Snowboard’s interest in expansion. The organization previously pursued governing roles in surfing and skateboarding, efforts that critics cite as evidence of a broader ambition to build a multi-sport governing body, the very kind of concentration the Ted Stevens Act was written to prevent. Goldschmidt described those episodes as different in kind. Surfing, she said, “just got too political,” and the organization walked away; skateboarding remains “ongoing” with “no immediate decisions.” Biathlon, she argued, is a natural fit that most European countries adopted long ago. “I get asked all the time, why is biathlon not integrated within your organization,” she said. “It’s a natural fit in many ways.”

Who controls the board

Because the autonomy argument turns on control, the composition of the board is more than a technicality, and it is an area where early rumors and current terms diverge sharply.

Gierhart was emphatic that the U.S. Biathlon board does not shrink or change hands. “The board is going to continue at the same size it is by the bylaws. It’s 12 to 15 members. They’re voted on by the membership,” he said. Those voters remain biathlon’s own roughly 1,500 members, whose categories will be tracked separately even after membership systems migrate to U.S. Ski & Snowboard’s platform in the 2027-28 season. “Our board size is not going to change. The composition is not going to change,” Gierhart said.

Just as important, he said, is what that board keeps deciding. Among the authorities it retains is control of the budget and the annual plan, meaning that where biathlon’s money is spent would still be approved by the U.S. Biathlon board of directors.

The new layer is the Biathlon Sport Committee, which the agreement describes as being drawn from the existing board, “6 to 8 members,” and maintaining the 33 percent athlete representation required by USOPC bylaws. The chair of that committee and one athlete representative would sit on the U.S. Ski & Snowboard governance board, giving biathlon two seats and a direct voice in the larger organization. The arrangement runs in both directions: U.S. Ski & Snowboard would, in turn, have representation on the U.S. Biathlon board.

Athlete voice, a recurring worry, is addressed specifically. Rather than being folded into U.S. Ski & Snowboard’s athlete representation, “biathlon would still maintain its separate voice of athletes on the Team USA [Athletes’] Commission,” Gierhart said. “We’d have our own.”

What changes for the athletes

For the people who actually race, the alliance is not an abstraction about governance. It is a question about who pays for the plane ticket to Europe.

U.S. Biathlon funds its athletes to a degree unusual among American winter sports. “Our athletes within biathlon are better funded and supported than in any other winter sport,” Gierhart said, noting that the program fully funds its World Cup athletes and nearly fully funds its IBU Cup athletes. Revisiting the specifics, he said U.S. Biathlon provides its athletes $48,000 in direct athlete support, $35,000 in need-based assistance, and $30,000 in performance bonuses, and secures roughly $36,000 a year for its top competitors. Cross-country, by contrast, does not pay national-team skiers to compete on the World Cup; much of that burden falls to clubs and to community fundraising.

That gap is the source of the athletes’ most concrete fear. Jake Brown, who retired from biathlon this year and sits on the U.S. Biathlon board as an athlete representative, said the worry he hears most is that biathlon’s funding model quietly converts to the ski-team model once the sports combine. He is careful to add nuance. “There’s nothing guaranteed that U.S. Biathlon will continue funding World Cups either,” he said. “The funding has to be there.” Biathlon also draws money from the IBU for each athlete who starts a race, which makes subsidizing those starts partly self-financing, and the sport has leaned into keeping athletes in the pipeline rather than cutting them early. “We can’t afford to lose them,” Brown said.

The agreement attempts to lock that model in place, but only for a defined window. The current athlete support model “will continue through the 2030 Olympic quad,” it says, with “National Team, World Cup, IBU Cup, Youth, and Junior athlete support structures” remaining “in place unless changes are jointly approved by the Biathlon Sport Director and the U.S. Biathlon Board.” As with the incremental funding, the guarantee runs one cycle. What happens after 2030 is precisely what no document can promise, though, as Gierhart notes, biathlon cannot promise that to itself every year either.

No voice in this debate has lived that risk more directly than Justin Wadsworth, the former U.S. Olympian who now is U.S. Biathlon’s Head Physiology Coach (working with both the men’s and women’s national teams) and who spent years coaching in Canada, including a stretch as a high-performance director there. Wadsworth described watching Biathlon Canada’s funding collapse. “Over the last eight to ten years, we’ve seen organizations having funded the athletes for all camps, all trips, everything, to now athletes paying for training camps, paying for trips,” he said. “That’s basically what’s really pulled Biathlon Canada down. The athletes just can’t afford to go on trips or training camps.”

The damage, he said, was not only financial. “It really changes the dynamic with the team,” Wadsworth said. “As a coach and as an organization, it’s much harder when athletes are paying for everything.” His wife, Beckie Scott, the Olympic champion who now leads Nordiq Canada, made cutting athlete fees a priority for exactly that reason. Asked what U.S. Biathlon should guard most carefully, Wadsworth did not hesitate. “The number one is just, are the athletes going to continue to be getting funded when they’re absorbed with U.S. Ski and Snowboard.”

Brown framed the same anxiety in a different register, as a question of trust. “There is a strength in independence,” he said. “You have a trust that your leader, when they put their head on the pillow every night, is trying to figure out how to make biathlon better in the country, and not trying to figure out how to prioritize what sport within a larger organization.” That, more than any statute, is the emotional core of the opposition: the fear that biathlon becomes one line item among many, advocated for by executives whose attention is divided.

The community’s own working group named the same items. The high-performance group’s report listed what “must be protected”: the centralized national team model, athlete stipends and need-based aid, the pathway that recruits skiers into biathlon, the world-class ski-service program, the Montana State University sport-science partnership, and “athlete-centered decision making.” It also warned, in writing, of the risk that unites the skeptics and the supporters, that “differences in stipends, housing, and athlete funding philosophies will be inequities across sports,” and that “the reasoning behind this must be explained well, or there is high risk of tension between sports.”

The case for

Set the fears aside and the argument for the alliance is not hard to follow, and some of its most persuasive versions come from people with no stake in the outcome.

Wadsworth, who says he has “no real skin in the game” and is “just trying to coach right now,” makes the efficiency case from painful experience. A small governing body cannot carry the overhead a large one can. “An appeal, from an athlete and the organization needs to get a lawyer for that, a single appeal can cost 30 to $50,000,” he said, “and if that’s 5 percent of your budget, that’s a big hit.” Fold biathlon into a larger organization with in-house counsel, fundraising staff, a training center, and sport scientists, he said, and those costs largely vanish. “Those efficiencies are really the positive side.”

Goldschmidt’s version is about scale on the revenue side. U.S. Ski & Snowboard, she wrote to biathlon’s members, generated “more than 900 million social media impressions and 7 billion earned media impressions last season,” counts more than a million social followers, and has “more than doubled our commercial revenue over the last four years,” with “nearly 85 percent of that revenue going directly to athletics.” Biathlon, by her argument, brings a genuinely valuable and telegenic property, the IBU World Cup is among the most-watched winter sports in Europe, that a 35,000-follower organization cannot monetize on its own. “One plus one can equal a lot more than two,” she said, “most importantly for biathlon.”

Gierhart’s case is about the limits of the status quo. “We’ve been doing the same thing for 60 years,” he said. “We’re a small sport, we have limited resources. We’ve always had a thin bench. But the formula isn’t changing. And if we’re going to try to drive transformational change, we’ve got to look at some things a little differently.”

And there is the pipeline, the argument that biathlon and cross-country are natural partners that have been kept artificially apart. Today a club that wants to offer both sports contends with two governing bodies, two memberships, two coaching-education systems, two calendars. The sport-development working group’s central recommendation was to merge those tracks, shared coach education, coordinated regional calendars, laser biathlon introduced to youth skiers, so that, in Brown’s words, the “big potential benefit comes in the sport development space.” Wadsworth added the practical constraint that enthusiasm tends to skip past: it comes down to shooting ranges. “The number one thing for biathlon is you need a range, and so that’s probably a limiting factor,” he said. “If U.S. Ski and Snowboard decides they really want to focus on the development side, they’re going to have to build more biathlon ranges. If you build it, they’ll come.”

The case against, in the community’s own words

The sharpest questions about the alliance do not come from the members trading accusations online. They come from the process U.S. Biathlon itself ran. The working groups produced plenty of enthusiasm for closer collaboration, and their reports document at length the benefits participants believed an alliance could unlock. But the same reports surfaced a recurring doubt.

Across all three groups, participants returned to a single question: if the goal is collaboration between biathlon and cross-country, why does it require a formal alliance? The consolidated report notes that “several participants observed that many of these initiatives could theoretically be pursued without a formal alliance.” The sport-development group put it more bluntly in its written takeaway: “Some expressed confident progress could be made without an alliance. It is not accountability that will move this from conversation to action. It is the passion of the people involved in both sports.” (U.S. Biathlon cautions on every page that the working-group notes were “generated during meetings in which judgment was not applied” and “do not represent the decisions or strategies” of the organization.)

The governance group’s “parking lot” of unresolved issues reads like a checklist of the skeptics’ concerns: “Ted Stevens Act compliance,” “an escape path if integration fails,” “what autonomy does Sport Committee have to direct USSS operations,” and whether a replacement is needed for the athletes’ advisory council “to preserve biathlete input.” The high-performance group flagged “budget flexibility,” asked “which proposed benefits truly require an alliance, and which can already be achieved through partnership,” and wondered whether biathlon could build its own dedicated fundraising vehicle, an equivalent of the National Nordic Foundation, without merging at all.

U.S. Ski & Snowboard’s answer to the “why not just collaborate” question is that informal collaboration has been tried, and has not delivered. The alliance-alignment document U.S. Biathlon distributed argues that, while the two organizations “have collaborated successfully for many years, this formal Alliance creates a level of commitment, coordination and accountability that cannot be achieved through informal collaboration alone.” Gierhart put it more sharply. He said he disagrees “wholeheartedly” with the notion that passion alone will carry the work forward. “You need accountability,” he said, describing what he sees as a fundamental difference within the community over how things actually get done. Goldschmidt made the same point about incentives: absent a formal structure, she said, no one at a big organization is measured on whether they helped a small one. “Why would I help another sport if that’s not how I’m measured?”

Then there is the matter of process and speed, which even supportive athletes acknowledge. Brown said the spring rollout caught the community off guard. “It kind of came out in the springtime. It was a little bit surprising, and it took us some time to understand why,” he said. “Most of the membership and the athlete body, we had some catching up to do.” The working groups were themselves a response to feedback that the process had moved too fast with too little consultation, and some members continue to argue that a binding vote should wait for the final agreement and its independent legal review, both of which, by U.S. Biathlon’s own account, come after Wednesday.

The exit, and what the fine print says

If there is a single provision that will decide how much reassurance skeptics take from this deal, it is the exit. Gierhart is adamant that it is a last resort, not a trap door.

He described a defined process. Goals and key performance indicators would be set at the outset, with an assessment after the first year and a comprehensive review at the end of the quad. “If we get to a point where there’s irreconcilable differences,” he said, “then there is an option to move towards a different operating structure, which could mean that U.S. Biathlon becomes an independent operating entity again. And that is a choice that can be made by either party. It doesn’t have to be mutually agreed upon.”

He was careful to say that does not mean either side can simply walk away on a whim. The written summary describes an interim assessment after the 2026-27 season and a comprehensive review after 2029-30, and says that “should significant challenges arise that materially impair the objectives of the alliance, the organizations will first implement a corrective action plan.” Only “if substantial concerns remain unresolved after those efforts” would “alternative organizational structures, including the return of U.S. Biathlon to an independently operated organization, be considered.” That, Gierhart said, matches what he meant: a process of measuring progress against shared goals, trying to fix what is not working, and only then, if the problems prove irreconcilable, allowing either party to end the alliance without the other’s consent.

“I don’t want it to sound in any way that in four years there’s an exit ramp that’s most likely going to happen,” he said. It is less an exit ramp, in his framing, than a runaway-truck ramp: an emergency measure, rarely used, that exists only for the case where nothing else has worked. The distinction that matters, he said, is that the eventual decision does not require both sides to agree. “It would probably be the board of directors of U.S. Biathlon that would say, we can’t resolve these differences and we want to make a change. Or Ski and Snowboard would say this is not working.”

What happens Wednesday

The board meets Wednesday at 4 p.m. Eastern. By Gierhart’s account, directors received an extensive board package over the preceding weekend, and the athlete representatives, who under USOPC rules make up a third of the board, have been closely engaged.

What the vote settles may be narrower than the noise around it suggests. If the board approves the foundational terms, the more detailed operating agreement, and its independent legal review, would follow, along with a further board vote to approve it. If the board balks, or postpones, the timeline slides. Either outcome will be read as a verdict on a process that many in the community found rushed and many others found overdue.

The stakes are real in both directions, which is why the debate has been so bitter. If biathlon stays independent, it does so facing a documented funding cut and the same structural constraints that have kept it small for six decades. If it joins, it trades a measure of autonomy for stability, resources, and a commercial platform it has never had, and it does so on the promise, guaranteed for four years and asserted in perpetuity, that the sport it has built will not be diminished inside a larger one.

The people on every side of this insist they want the same thing. “Whichever way the board decides,” Brown said, “I really want to be able to take our membership with us in whichever direction we go, and maintain good relationships with our full community. Because otherwise, we lose.”

On Wednesday afternoon, fifteen people will decide which way that goes.

FasterSkier will report the outcome of Wednesday’s vote. Reporting for this article included interviews with U.S. Ski & Snowboard president and CEO Sophie Goldschmidt, U.S. Biathlon president and CEO Jack Gierhart, U.S. Biathlon athlete representative Jake Brown, and U.S. Biathlon head physiology coach Justin Wadsworth, a written statement from the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee, and a review of the alliance term sheet, the July 2026 community working-group reports, and correspondence from members opposed to the deal.

Because the details of this proposal are complex, quotations attributed to U.S. Ski & Snowboard and to U.S. Biathlon were provided to each organization in advance of publication so they could verify the accuracy of their own statements and clarify technical details. FasterSkier retained full editorial control over the content, framing, and conclusions of this article.

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