I don’t know how many of you have given a lot of thought to the sport of biathlon. I suspect it’s not a big subject of conversations. Here either, but when you watch figure skating as fanatically as I do (go SASHA!), you meet up with it once every four years during the Winter Olympics. They don’t tend to show it – unless by some freak accident, an American is expected to win a medal, ARGH, the only reason the American networks bother to show us ANY of the sports, in between commercials, but you catch mention of it in the “pre-Olympics” sections of the newspaper, or the wrap-ups in the paper. The bloody tedious “medal count” because well, frankly in some countries theirs IS bigger than ours. (wanna hear how the US did in the recent Rhythmic Gymnastics World Championships? Best we did was 58th. Not a priority here, eh?)

So I don’t know a thing about biathlon except it’s WEIRD but I get it. Technically it’s a 2 event sport, yeah, yeah but what we mean when we use it here is a competition involving cross-country skiing and shooting. No, not at each other, although that would make it more interesting in some ways, no TARGET shooting. WHY do I bring this to your attention? Because every so often when we do have the tv dial on the winter games, we start coming up with alternative biathlons. And then in the paper, today I see that someone beat us to it.

On October 1, a Bulgarian won the first title in “chessboxing” a “sport” that combines 6 four-minute chess rounds alternating with 2 minute boxing rounds.

Well there goes MY Sumo/Go biathlon idea.