The Greatest Story on Snow: Olympic Biathlon

(Photo above of Tiril Eckhoff, courtesy of BillyBonkers/Norges Skiskytterforbund)

It used to be that setting the alarm for 4 a.m. meant an early morning trip to the airport. These days, my only travels are to the living room to watch the women’s 15 km individual race, the opening individual event of Olympic women’s biathlon competition. At least I don’t even have to put on my shoes, let alone take them off for TSA. And the coffee is cheaper.

I love biathlon enough to set the alarm, and I’m not sure why. I have no more expertise in the sport than the person who calls AAA to change a flat tire (also me) has watching Formula 1.

I love skiing, but all I know of the cross-country version is more or less limited to trying to get from one lift to another at the base of a (downhill) ski resort.

And that’s still vastly more experience than I possess in trying to hit five targets from 50 meters with a .22 caliber rifle. In the wind. And the cold. I mean, it looks difficult? And given my accuracy when I try to throw a shirt in a laundry basket that is considerably closer than 50 meters, I’m guessing I wouldn’t hit biathlon’s 1.8 inch target (from the prone position) or 4.5 inch target (when standing) more than 80 percent of the time, as Olympic athletes do.

Despite that deep reserve of ignorance, the sport always intrigued me during the Olympics. And since discovering that NBC (now Peacock) streams World Cup events, I watched more or less every women’s World Cup race the past three seasons. Returning from an early morning walk, settling in with a cup of coffee and “traveling” to snow-covered forests in Oestersund, Sweden or Hochfilzen, Austria makes a week of stress disappear for an hour or two.

Until recently, those streams were just the raw video production without any commentary. While I eventually noticed that replays on the Olympic Channel included announcers, learning the sport while hearing only natural sound added something to the experience. At least for the World Cup circuit, there are microphones immediately below some of the shooting stations. It is mesmerizing hearing how hard the athletes are breathing when they arrive, only to slow their heartbeats and manage their breathing in a matter of seconds to begin shooting. That gets lost if someone is talking over it.

Some of my favorite people in media are announcers, and for all the grief they get, they work extremely hard to pass on knowledge and information. But biathlon is visually captivating. I never understood how people made sense of all the information constantly flashing across the bottom and side of the screen on CNBC. But watching biathlon, you slowly learn to speak a similarly unique language — reading time splits at the same time you’re watching a dozen shooters on the range. There’s a lot going on, and it’s entirely possible that some of attraction was in learning (an ongoing process) to piece together the puzzle and what it all meant.

That also leaves a lot of room for mistaken impression. Believe me, after “doing my own research” on biathlon, I’ll yield to the experts when it comes to strategy, technique, rules, history and, well, just about everything. But sports isn’t just about understanding technical excellence or athletic prowess. It’s also a story. It’s drama. Not manufactured drama or hot air debates but genuine drama — as in theater.

That’s what any sport really is over the course of a season or seasons, a recurring production with the same characters and ever-changing plot lines. Go see Othello in the theater and you’re going to see amazing characters tell an amazing story. But while brilliant, it’s the same story every time. In sports, it’s different every game or every race. And sure, some of the stories end up being duds. But each one has the potential to be the best story ever told.

After several years, I’ve come to know the characters who will compete in the biggest races of their lives over the next two weeks. They’re rivals and friends, alternately heroic and hapless. I can’t help you much on the nuances of the sport. I can’t tell you anything about which team has the best wax technicians. The announcers in the opening mixed relay event, won by Norway in a dramatic finish, said the venue in Beijing has slow snow. I don’t think they meant slushy, given the frigid conditions, so I can’t really help you with what that actually means.

But the characters? If you’re interested in a new story, I can help you there. Consider this your theater program, a list of the cast that might win you over if you tune in.

It’s worth it. Coffee tastes better before the sun comes up.

Norway’s Marte Olsbu Roeiseland (courtesy Steffen Prößdorf)

Those likable Norwegians

The Norwegians should be the ones who the casual fans root against. They’re the Yankees or UConn. Historically speaking, at least according to some of the sport’s origin stories, it’s their sport. But darned if the current Norwegian team isn’t likable to a fault.

At least if you aren’t the ones trying to keep up with them on the course.

The best biathlete in each of the past two seasons races for Norway, but it isn’t the same person. Current favorite Marte Olsbu Roeiseland and reigning World Cup overall champion Tiril Eckhoff bring very different stories to Beijing.

Roeiseland is a bit of a terminator. This season, she hits the target 92 percent of the time from the prone position and 93 percent from the standing position — the only athlete among the top contenders currently at 90 percent in both. She’s also able to chase just about anyone down on the course. And yet it’s difficult to begrudge her the success. Now 31, she wasn’t the great hope of Norwegian biathlon. She toiled on the fringes of the elite for several seasons before really coming to the forefront during the 2018-19 season. And she speaks and carries herself like someone who appreciates the journey, always eager to congratulate those around her (admittedly easier to do when you’re often congratulating them on finishing behind you).

Eckhoff is no less engaging, often playing the leading role in teammate Ingrid Landmark Tandrevold’s amusing chronicles of life in biathlon. And last season, she was no less dominant, cruising to the overall title and winning 13 races — 10 more than any other athlete. Small even in comparison to her peers, she is explosive on her skis. But the new season hasn’t been as kind to the 31-year-old. She has yet to make an individual podium, let alone win a race, and entered the Olympics hanging on to a place in the top 20 of the overall standings.

Hanna Oeberg congratulates sister Elvira Oeberg.

Sweden’s Venus and Serena dynamic

Hanna Oeberg was the breakout star of the 2018 Olympics, opening the women’s competition by winning gold in the 15 km individual race without missing any of 20 shots on the range. She won that race before ever winning on the World Cup circuit, but she has six more wins and 25 more podium finishes in World Cup and World Championship events in the years since.

Long and lanky, she seems built for purpose — able to generate tremendous power while appearing to glide. Still just 26 years old, she could rule the sport for years.

But one of the stories of this season is the Serena and Venus dynamic emerging as her younger sister comes into her own. And until this season, Elvira Oeberg was very much Hanna’s younger sister. Just 22 years old (she’ll turn 23 later this month), Elvira hadn’t won a World Cup event until winning the 10 km pursuit in Annecy, France on Dec. 18. Then she won again the next day in the 12.5 km mass start. And three weeks later in Ruhpolding, Germany in the 7.5 km sprint. That matched her sister’s total wins from the past two seasons combined.

The first win was particularly impressive. When I started following the sport, I assumed shooting rules all — that the skiing was just to kill time between rounds on the range. The broadcasts, which focus heavily on the action on the range, often make it seem that way. And shooting is huge. But Elvria, whose 80 percent accuracy from the prone position is still a weak spot, won her first race despite missing two shots. That was one more than viable contenders like Julia Simon, Anais Bescond and Austria’s Lisa Theresa Hauser. Yet the younger Oeberg was so relentless over the 10 km of skiing that it didn’t matter.

So will Elvira complete her ascent in Beijing, leaving Hanna to play the role of Elvira’s sister?

The Belarus conundrum

One of the storylines that hooked me on biathlon was following Darya Domracheva’s roller coaster in 2018. After winning three of the four individual gold medals in 2014, Domracheva missed significant time in the years that followed, due first to illness and later pregnancy. Her attempt to complete the comeback with more Olympic medals was presented as one of the main narratives in 2018. She struggled in the early races but closed out her career by winning an individual silver in the mass start and a gold medal in the relay.

All of which is to say I was inclined to keep an eye on what happened to the Belarusian story following her retirement. Sure enough, Dzinara Alimbekava and Hanna Sola emerged as two of the easiest athletes to root for. Alimbekava is relentlessly steady, quietly going about her business and almost always finishing in the top 10 (if rarely atop the podium). And Sola appears to have come almost out of nowhere to join the elite, a recent dip in form notwithstanding.

It would be great to see either follow in Domracheva’s footsteps — if it wasn’t for the regime currently commandeering their country. Once dubbed Europe’s last dictator, an overly optimistic assessment of the future of democracy, Alexander Lukashenko remains in power and remains an autocratic thug. How much should that matter when it comes to watching sports? Should an athlete be responsible for the sins of a political regime? I don’t know what either Alimbekava or Sola think of Lukashenko. If they want to continue skiing, I don’t imagine it would behoove them to speak out even if they felt as aggrieved as the tens of thousands who protest in Minsk.

Cast agains the backdrop of an entire Olympics swathed in moral and ethical shortcomings, I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about two imminently likable Belarusians.

Italy’s Dorothea Wierer (courtesy Steffen Prößdorf)

The Italian legend of Dorothea Wierer

Wierer gives off a little bit of an aura of who Hollywood would cast in a movie about biathlon — when Wierer was late for a press conference, Eckhoff joked that she had probably already left the venue by helicopter. But with three golds from the World Championships and 15 World Cup podium finishes, Wierer is more substance than style.

She’s a good skier relative to the bulk of the world circuit, but she’s not on the same level as the Norwegians or Swedes. She’s not going to chase down an Oberg. But when she’s at her best, no one is more fun to watch on the range. She rolls through five shots in the blink of an eye with unnervingly accuracy. She wasn’t as accurate or as quick early this season, which seems like it could be the 31-year-old’s farewell campaign. But she won the 12.5 km mass start on Jan. 23, the final race before the Olympics (admittedly when several top peers were already in high-altitude training for Beijing). Her first Olympic individual medal would be a fitting capstone.

The French Connection

The French are excellent in biathlon. They’re the only country with three women ranked in the World Cup overall top 10 at the moment. I am quite fond of France in general. Given that Denmark, my first rooting interest in all things, is the Scandinavian outlier when it comes to biathlon (not enough snow), I ought to default to cheering for the French.

Here’s the thing. I have a difficult time telling the French skiers apart. They don’t look alike, mind you, but to my untrained eye, Anais Bescond, Justine Braisaz-Bouchet and Julia Simon seem to take turns contending one week and fading into the pack the next week. I’ll start to think that Simon is clearly the best of them, only for Bescond to end up on the podium the next time out. Like Arizona State or Rutgers in women’s basketball back in the late 2000s or early 2010s, they’re impossible not to respect but somehow also not consistently memorable.

Perhaps because she’s the least consistent of them, Braisaz-Bouchet is the most compelling. She’s a dominant skier; she can make up 30 seconds on most of her peers in the span of a lap. She’s also a supremely inconsistent shooter — 74 percent accuracy from the prone position this season, which is 20 percent worse than a model of consistency like Alimbekava. I assume this keeps the French coaches up at night, but it makes her an intriguing boom-or-bust wild card.

Germany’s Denise Herrmann won gold in the 15 km individual.

The German Two-Sport Surprise

I didn’t even mention Germany’s Denise Herrmann initially because, let’s face it, this is already longer than anything without chapters needs to be. Then the 33-year-old went out and won gold in the 15 km individual, missing just one of 20 shots.

A former cross-country skier who even won an Olympic medal in that sport in 2014 and then shifted to biathlon, Herrmann was overshadowed by countrywoman Laura Dahlmeier before the latter retired after winning double Olympic gold in 2018. I think I often underestimated Herrmann because she wasn’t as prolific as Dahlmeier. She wasn’t the best German I’d seen. To be fair, Monday’s win also came against form. Herrmann entered these Olympics just 18th in the overall World Cup standings and hadn’t won an individual race at any distance during the pandemic.

Herrmann’s final appearance before the Olympics hardly hinted at what was to come. Most of the German team skipped the final World Cup stop in order to train at high altitude. But Herrmann had to leave that training and enter the final race in Antholz, Italy to try and save her place in the top 15 in the overall world standings — those athletes automatically qualify for the mass start in the Olympics. It didn’t work, a poor finish in Antholz cost Herrmann the final place in the top 15 (which went to Norway’s Landmark Tandrevold). After Monday’s gold in the individual, it’s safe to say she found another way into the field for next week’s mass start.

All evidence suggested an athlete entering what is presumably her final Olympics and who had missed her window for glory. Instead, after two difficult years, Herrmann completed the journey that began when she changed sports by winning the biggest race of her life.

Again, you never know what role a character will play when a new story begins.

And here are the women’s individual competitions.

Monday: 15 km individual. Five laps with four shooting stops, two prone and two standing. Skiers start one at a time, 30 seconds apart. The fastest overall time wins.

Friday: 7.5 km sprint. Three laps with two shooting stops, one prone and one standing. Skiers start one at a time, 30 seconds apart. The fastest overall time wins.

Feb. 13: 10 km pursuit. Five laps with four shooting stops, two prone and two standing. First to the finish line wins. The start is based on times in the sprint. So if you finished 20 seconds behind the sprint winner, you start 20 seconds after she does in the pursuit.

Feb. 19: 12.5 km mass start. Five laps with four shooting stops, two prone and two standing. As the name implies, the top 30 skiers start at the same time. First to the finish line wins.

Betschart and Hüberli Win European Championship

“You never thought about oh my gosh we missed it in the second set? You always still believed?”

“Hmm, uh, to be honest, it was a little bit in my mind.”

Interviews in second (or third or fourth) languages are often less than revealing. It’s difficult enough for most of us to express ourselves in the language we know best, let alone find the right words and grammatical constructions to convey complex thoughts in another language. Order a meal or ask about a train schedule? Sure. Describe emotional states of existence? Trickier.

But on rare occasions that process strips away any artifice or obfuscation. All that’s left is the simple, honest truth. So it seemed with Nina Betschart’s answer above, delivered in English with an almost embarrassed grin in the obligatory postgame television interview after Saturday’s semifinal between Switzerland and Germany in the European Beach Volleyball Championships.

Betschart and partner Tanja Hüberli had just pulled off the seemingly impossible by winning five consecutive points — the first three on the brink of elimination — to complete a comeback and reach the final in Vienna, Austria.

The ensuing championship match was almost anticlimactic for the Swiss — if winning a career-defining title in front of a frenzied, partying crowd in a three-story arena whose design was part Elizabethan and part Mad Max can be anticlimactic. Betschart and Hüberli rolled over a talented but inexperienced Dutch team in the final. It was joyous, to be sure, and the celebration complete with hugs, tears, the Swiss national anthem and some impressively committed champagne consumption. Even without Americans, Brazilians, Canadians or Australians, the trophy is a big deal to lift.

14.08.2021, Wien, Heumarkt Beachvolleyball, Europameisterschaft, Finale Stam / Schoon (NED) vs. Betschart / Hüberli (SUI) Foto: Conny Kurth / http://www.kurth-media.de

As a fan of the Swiss team, I savored those scenes. They finished second in the same event in 2018, the same year they were semifinalists in the World Championship. They are often close to trophies, but until this win, their biggest title was a 1-star event. Still, the part of the weekend that fascinates me most wasn’t the outcome as much as Betschart’s quote and those points late in the semifinal.

How often do athletes talk after a comeback about how they never stopped believing? How often do we, in turn, ascribe to them some sort of superhuman mental strength that prevents them from accepting defeat? I can’t help thinking that shortchanges them.

In a work project the other day, I tried to decide between using “courage” and “bravery” in a passage. I would have preferred bravery because I’m a sucker for alliteration, which applied in this instance. And most sources suggest they are, at least practically, interchangeable. But to me, correct or not, bravery implies acting without regard to potential consequences, whereas courage implies understanding the consequences but acting nonetheless.

Both, I’ll hasten to add, are overused in the context of sports. Still, listening to Betschart reminded me of at least the essence the debate. If someone down 14-11 in the third set really doesn’t have any doubt that she will win, it’s still a good story if she does win. It’s still a remarkable comeback. But it’s no more relatable to most of us than is world-class athleticism.

Doubting and carrying on anyway? That’s far more familiar.

At no point in my life could I jump or run like Betschart. At no point was I as fit. (Nor was I at any point willing to put the time and effort into training my lesser abilities that she has into hers.) But I think I can imagine what it was like for her when she was down 14-11 and wondering if it might all be about to go wrong again.

For the second time this month, first in the Olympics and now in the sport’s biggest continental championship, Betschart and Hüberli faced not just impending defeat but impending defeat in a distinctly soul crushing manner.

In the Olympics, it happened in a marathon third set against countrywomen Anouk Vergé-Dépré and Joanna Heidrich in the Round of 16. That pair went on to win the first ever Swiss medals in women’s beach volleyball.

Saturday in Vienna, Betschart and Hüberli didn’t finish off multiple match points in a second set against Nina Borger and Julia Sude in which the Swiss led 16-11 late. That set eventually lost and the match leveled, Betschart and Hüberli were then down 14-11 in a winner-take-all third set to 15.

They got to 14-12 when Borger’s serve down the line went just wide, their fate out of their own hands as Betschart watched and hoped the ball didn’t clip some fraction of the tape.

Survival still meant winning consecutive points while serving. That is rare enough during any stretch in match. It’s all the more daunting with a place in the final on the line.

A big dose of Swiss good fortune made it 14-13, Hüberli’s serve clipping the top of the net and dropping straight down on the German side. But the Germans still just needed a side out to win.

Sude’s first pass off the next serve was heavy. The ball drifted too far, directly over the net, and left Hüberli and Borger with equal opportunity to play it as they leapt. Hüberli made contact first with her right hand, but in doing so, she only managed to push the ball onto Borger’s hands — the German steering the ball right back over the net onto the Swiss side.

14.08.2021, Wien, Heumarkt Beachvolleyball, Europameisterschaft, Halbfinale Betschart / Hüberli (SUI) vs. Borger / Sude (GER) Foto: Conny Kurth / http://www.kurth-media.de

Now falling away from the net as she came back to earth, Hüberli reached out her left arm in time to pop the ball into the air. Betschart then had the presence of mind to eschew any attempt to set the ball for her partner and instead hit it over the Germans and into the empty court between them and the baseline to tie the score 14-14.

And that was only half the job done. The Swiss went on to win two more points on Hüberli’s serve. They earned another match point when Sude hit the ball wide trying to go around Hüberli’s attempted block at the net. A Betschart dig and kill provided the fifth point in a row to win the match and send the teammates tumbling to the sand in celebration.

It was an unlikely enough scenario for the semifinal of any major tournament. But again, this all came less than two weeks after Betschart and Hüberli lost in the Olympics.

And not just lost but lost to their closest rivals (the team they had in recent months at the very least caught, if not supplanted, as the top Swiss side), 23-21 in the third set. The bronze medals that Vergé-Dépré and Heidrich deservedly won in the end could well have been theirs.

Even as someone who was only ever tournament-adjacent as a journalist, I remember the temporary hollowness that accompanied the end of a World Cup or Olympics. There is an all-consuming quality to those events. The months of buildup, the travel, the deadlines and the unrelenting grind of the event itself (with plenty of amazing and memorable aspects mixed in).

Even knowing you’re staying through the final game, a luxury the participants certainly don’t have, the end comes suddenly. One day you’re in a packed stadium in Vancouver or listening to anthems in Rio de Janeiro. The next day you’re in a Hampton Inn in Hibbing, Minnesota or eating a pre-dawn breakfast in a mostly empty IHOP near the Atlanta airport. It is jarring.

For athletes, especially all of those who don’t win their final competition or realize their lifelong dreams, the sense of dislocation must be orders of magnitude more profound.

There are other championships and other goals. But on some level, Tokyo had shaped Betschart and Hüberli’s world for five years.

It must have hit Betschart and Hüberli somewhere on the flight from Tokyo to Vienna.

Forget the physical challenges posed by jet lag involved or blistering temperatures in Vienna that left the sand temperature over 100 degrees for most matches. It had to be an immense mental challenge merely to be in the right head space to compete at all. It is difficult to fathom how anyone in the Swiss position could still believe when down three points in the third set.

Which is why Betschart’s answer, perhaps without the native-language fluency to evade the question, was so wonderfully revealing.

She didn’t believe. Not entirely. Not with the unthinking, blind belief of a zealot. She knew what the most likely outcome of the next few moments was.

And she played through that doubt. That’s more impressive. Or at least more human.

Alyssa Naeher’s Routine Morning

The world has changed quite a bit for all of us in the past three years. For few of us more than Alyssa Naeher.

In 2019, she wins a World Cup as the starting goalkeeper for the United States.

In 2020, along with the rest of us, she endures a pandemic unprecedented in our lifetimes.

In 2021, she plays in her first Olympics, five years after being an unused sub behind Hope Solo.

There is a scratch on one of the walls in my apartment I’ve been meaning to patch for three years. Naeher, on the other hands, watched her whole life change in that span. The latest entry was Friday’s penalty shootout against the Netherlands. Her two saves — including the stop against the seemingly unstoppable Vivianne Miedema — helped the U.S. reach the semifinals.

Watching the drama unfold over a cup of coffee in the still-breakfast hours stateside, I couldn’t help but think back to something she said during the team’s training camp back in 2018. It was a lengthy interview, but Naeher in my experience was always very (understandably) careful to say only as much as she wanted to say. She wasn’t going to take a question and stroll off on a five-minute stream-of-consciousness digression about her inner thoughts and aspirations.

Yet if hardly revelatory (I don’t remember if it even made it into the profile, but I don’t think it did), one answer struck me as a glimpse into her real self. Not revelatory, just transparent.

“Something that I found that was helpful in all the chaos of being on the move was if I could at least start my day the same way, then it would give me some semblance of normalcy,” Naeher said that day in Manhattan Beach. “For me that became waking up, having some quiet time, grabbing a coffee, doing a crossword, reading a book — just having that quiet time to myself in the morning, I can do that anywhere and that starts my day.”

Maybe it just resonated because it felt familiar. The first cup (or three) of coffee in the morning is life at its most peaceful. I don’t like waking up when it’s still dark outside, but I love being awake while the rest of the world snoozes. The subsequent chaos these days is created by email and Slack, rather than the decidedly more intense competition, travel and training that Naeher talked about. Still, the sentiment is the same.

Maybe extroverts feel this way, but it feels more like a refuge of the introvert.

“She knows herself very well,” Julie Ertz said of Naeher back then. “She’s very introverted but is an extrovert at the same time. She enjoys her alone time and she’s huge in crossword puzzles and very intelligent and smart, but has a huge heart and cares for everyone.”

The temptation to contrast 2016 and 2021 is tempting. Two quarterfinal shootouts, one in a mostly empty stadium in Brasilia and the other in a necessarily empty stadium in Japan. Two very different personalities in goal making two very different sort of headlines in the end.

At the same time, Solo had less to do with the U.S. exit that day in Brasilia than Naeher did with U.S. survival in this game. Solo’s infamous comments after that game against Sweden were inelegant, but I never really felt they were damning. They were just the final piece of a much bigger puzzle. Yet speaking purely about performance, Solo’s personality served her extraordinarily well. It served the national team extraordinarily well for a long time.

Just as Naeher, whether or not she wins universal acclaim as starter or keeps her spot through the next cycle, has now served this team quite well through three-plus challenging years.

Good for her.

I’d like to think she started her Friday with a coffee and crossword in Japan.

Better yet, I’d like to think she will again Saturday morning.

She will have a lot to do tomorrow. There are two more games to play, in part thanks to her.

But for those who savor silence and smell of coffee, morning routines are sacred.

Joy and Volleyball: From Escaping Pinochet’s Chile to the Olympics

It was a January night like any other for Hernan Humana as a new decade dawned in Chile. Which meant it was a night when he knew what the ringing phone might foretell.

“Hernan, I think your time has come.”

The words on the other end of the line that night weren’t meant as a threat. But in Chile in 1980, they chilled Humana to the bone.

The friend on the phone, a doctor, had been at a Chilean Olympic Committee meeting. A man in military uniform had opened his briefcase and taken out a Canadian newspaper critical of Augusto Pinochet, the dictator who seized power in a 1973 coup. Humana’s father, who fled Chile several years before, was the newspaper’s publisher. The military officer suggested that instead of praising Humana, a Chilean volleyball international and a coach in the youth national system, someone should cut his throat.

“When a military man in Chile at the time said that, it’s not a figure of speech,” Humana recalled. “It’s a threat. In less than two weeks, I was out of the country. That’s how I left Chile.”

These days a professor in York University’s School of Kinesiology and Health Sciences, he arrived in Canada four decades ago with few marketable skills beyond the volleyball court and no command of English. But in Chile at that time, you didn’t ignore warnings. Leaving was better than disappearing.

His daughter, Melissa Humana-Paredes, was born a little more than a decade after he arrived in Toronto. She knew little growing up about the dark years her parents lived under a dictatorship. She heard nothing about the inner turmoil her father felt when he represented Chile in international competition. Instead, she learned to share her father’s passion for a sport that ultimately shaped both their lives. Along with partner Sarah Pavan, she is a reigning beach volleyball world champion and among the gold medal favorite in the Olympics.

Love grows back stronger after heartbreak. Joy means more after sorrow. One of beach volleyball’s best players and most ebullient souls, joy for life and sport may lead Humana-Paredes, 28, to Olympic gold in Tokyo. They were also all her father took with him when he fled Pinochet’s Chile at 27.

“I was the same age as them when they were going through the coup and dictatorship,” Humana-Paredes said. “To put myself in those shoes, I can’t fathom it. I can’t relate to everything they went through at my age. And they came through and persevered and came to a new country and created a new life. My parents are just the happiest people and have this zest for life. You would never know that in their past they saw such horrors and atrocities.

“It made me look at them in a different light. You understand them differently.”

Volleyball under a dictator

Humana had already played for the Chilean national team by the time a coup changed everything about life in the country, including what the flag represented. He was a university student in Santiago on Sept. 11, 1973, when Augusto Pinochet’s military junta seized power from the democratically-elected government of President Salvador Allende. He saw confusion in the streets as people began to learn what was happening. Living in housing for national team athletes, he spent Septermber 12 under curfew and visited by soldiers. He was finally able to venture outside again on September 13.

In Playing Under the Gun: An Athlete’s Tale of Survival in 1970s Chile, his memoir, he recounts a conversation with a neighbor limping down the street.

He spoke slowly, as if seeing life around him in some terrible new light. On September 11, he was arrested by a military patrol and taken to the national stadium, where he was tortured. His interrogators wanted to know who was organizing the resistance in his neighborhood. He was burned with cigarettes butts, and electric cattle prods were applied all over his body. He raised his shirt to reveal purple bruises and burns all over his skin. It was shocking. I didn’t know what to say. How could I communicate my compassion for him? Nobody is taught proper etiquette for dealing with victims of torture.

The neighbor’s experience was one endured by far too many Chileans in the months and years that followed the coup, tens of thousands of ordinary citizens who were arrested, tortured, murdered or simply disappeared, their fates unconfirmed but also obvious.

Humana’s experience under the dictatorship was more fortunate by comparison, but it was also emblematic of the fugue that fell over the country. He had close calls. Soldiers searched his dorm room but didn’t notice proscribed books. A friend told him he had been denounced by a neighbor as an Allende sympathizer and militant. He was suspended from university for two years after running afoul of authorities. His father was arrested and detained for months, then blacklisted from any jobs in his former field of engineering. But like the vast swath of Chileans who were neither Pinochet supporters nor suffered the harshest fate in makeshift prisons, Humana mostly tried to find some normal routine in a country he hardly recognized.

In a chapter titled “Playing with Ghosts,” Humana writes about so often playing volleyball in what was then called the Estadio Chile, the national arena in Santiago. Along with the Estadio Nacional, the outdoor soccer stadium, it became a concentration camp and place of torture and execution following the coup (it was subsequently renamed in honor of Victor Jara, the poet who was tortured and murdered by Pinochet’s forces in the regime’s earliest days).

On one occasion, when he was playing particularly poorly, a friend cajoled him to do better for those who died there.

I remember looking straight into his eyes and silently wondering how he couldn’t understand what I was feeling. This was just a meaningless volleyball game. The real issue was the horrors so many had endured in this place. I did not say anything, and my game didn’t change drastically. I think that I had reached some kind of critical point. Perhaps I was more vulnerable that day, overcome by a profound sense of hopelessness for my country. All I know is that I didn’t want to play that day. Or better put, I couldn’t play that day.

Almost from the moment Pinochet seized power, when his volleyball team was dragooned into a farce of a youth festival at the national stadium, Humana and other athletes faced a dilemma familiar to those living under repressive regimes. Play on and offer what silent or subtle protest they could? Or refuse, risking the safety of friends and family and leaving spaces that would be filled by toadies all too willing to praise Pinochet and belt out the national anthem?

And when I didn’t play well, perhaps it was because I was on some level confronting the horrors, and confronting my own complicity through my role as the symbolic representative of the perpetrators.

His parents and siblings finally left for Canada in 1975. He remained in Chile to finish university, delayed by the suspension and the loss of purposeful destruction of records under the new regime. He continued to play the sport he loved. Although even that was forever changed.

By then, the beachfront club Trauco was long gone. Located in the city of Quintero, on the Pacific Ocean northwest of Santiago, Trauco was the spot where Humana fell in love with beach volleyball. He spent summers there at the invitation of the club owner, nominally working in the evenings but mostly playing for the club’s beach volleyball team. The club and volleyball carried on for a couple of years after the coup, but then Pinochet’s soldiers showed up one summer and destroyed all of it.

The Chile in which such things thrived was a fading, bitter memory.

A new life in Canada

So when the warning phone call finally came in 1980, the friend’s account of the Olympic Committee meeting quickly confirmed by another present, it was hardly a surprise. He made it through more than six years, but no one who wasn’t subservient could make it forever. There wasn’t any midnight run for the border, but within a week or two, he was in Canada.

His younger brother helped Humana make inroads in the volleyball community — and helped translate initially. Humana received an advanced coach certificate from York in 1983 and his Master’s from the school in 1993. He coached both men’s and women’s volleyball for York at various times.

In 1995, John Child approached Humana, his former youth indoor coach, about coaching beach volleyball. After appearing as a demonstration sport in the 1992 Olympics, beach volleyball was added to the regular program for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Calling on his experience in the sand in Chile, Humana took on the new challenge. Child and partner Mark Heese went on to win the bronze medal.

That remains Canada’s only Olympic medal in men’s or women’s beach volleyball. But that may be on the verge of changing. Humana-Paredes was still a few months shy of her fourth birthday in 1996, but she spent a lot of time in the sand while her dad continued to coach indoors and outdoors following the Olympics. Yet Humana recalls that far from him dragging her to practice, it was more often Melissa knocking on his door early on Saturday mornings to go and play.

“By no means was it pushed on us by our dad,” Humana-Paredes concurred. “He exposed us to the sport, and it was always around because we would be at the beaches to watch him practice and whatnot, but he never forced us into anything.

“For me, it was an immediate attraction. I started playing as soon as I could.”

Melissa Humana-Paredes goes for gold

While the picture may be changing with the growth of beach volleyball as an NCAA sport, notably including current Latvian Olympian Tina Graudina and former UCLA standouts and Canadian twins Megan and Nicole McNamara, it was still unusual 10-to-15 years ago for a teenager like Humana-Paredes to train almost exclusively for beach volleyball.

“She was by herself the whole winter playing beach volleyball alone,” Humana said. “It was a lonely, lonely battle. I was there with her, but it was a lonely battle. She would miss indoor, the social aspect and the friends that you make. She’s a very social person. But she loves beach volleyball. That’s her sport.”

She ultimately played four successful indoor seasons for York, where Hernan had previously coached the women’s volleyball team. But even then, the beach was her focus. After her freshman year at York, she and partner Taylor Pischke won a silver medal at the 2011 FIVB Junior World Championship in Halifax, losing to Switzerland’s Nina Betschart and Joanna Heidrich in the the final match (a decade later, three of the four are in the Olympics).

“I love beach because the incredible mental, physical and emotional challenges that it brings,” Humana-Paredes said. “You’re more involved in the game, you have more control of the game — you’re more independent.”

She played her first major pro event while still in college. A few months after finishing at York, she and Pischke reached the quarterfinals of a full-fledged FIVB event in Sao Paolo.

But it was while serving as a training player for the Canadian teams that qualified for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro that she got to know Pavan, the former NCAA indoor All-American at Nebraska. A few months later, back in Rio, they finished second in their first FIVB tournament together. They won a five-star event later that summer and soared up the rankings, Pavan’s prowess at the net a perfect complement to Humana-Paredes’ defense and passing.

In 2019, they won the World Championship in Hamburg, Germany, beating April Ross and Alix Klineman in the final and losing just two sets in five knockout round matches. That win came with the added bonus of automatic Olympic qualification, which proved all the more valuable as most other teams scrambled to adjust the pandemic-dictated qualification process this year.

Hernan coached her in the early years. He certainly had the resume for it, from the Olympic success in 1996 to running a beach volleyball club in Ontario. But he said that both agreed when she was a teenager that it would be better for her to work with the coaches then in the Canadian national program. Besides, the professional circuit that takes her from Asia to Europe to South America on a near-weekly basis wouldn’t fit a university professor’s life very well.

Still, when the frequently California-based Humana-Paredes returns to Toronto, it is her father serving her ball after ball in the otherwise empty gym. Just like always.

“My dad will always be my coach,” Humana-Paredes said of his influence nonetheless. “With his knowledge and background and passion and love for the game, I always respect and care for everything he tells me — whether I agree with it or not. I’ll always take what he says to heart.”

All the more after his memoir, which Humana dedicated to Melissa and her brother Felipe, and shared with them while writing it. Although they visited Chile on multiple occasions growing up, Pinochet finally ousted in 1988, they knew few of the details of their father’s life in Chile.

It is a story about the resiliency of joy. The same joy evident when Humana-Paredes plays. The joy she will feel listening to the Canadian anthem if she and Pavan stand atop the podium. It will sound far sweeter than the Chilean anthem did to her father by the end.

Maybe too much happened to too many to speak of winners and losers. But joy survived.

Swiss Beach Volleyball and a Remarkable Morning

An airborne Nina Betschart and Tanja Hüberli during a match in Las Vegas (2018)

Unless this sentence somehow finds its way to someone in the Swiss volleyball community, there is a good chance you’ve never heard of Nina Betschart and Tanja Hüberli. They did something rather remarkable Saturday — decidedly early Saturday if you happened to reside in the predawn darkness of our easternmost time zone.

They won a beach volleyball match.

Maybe that doesn’t sound all that remarkable. Betschart and Hüberli win quite a lot of matches. They enter the Olympics in a good run of form and seeded seventh in the field of 24 teams.

Nor is it wholly remarkable that they won despite handing their opponents a five-point lead in the opening set. Or that they beat Germans Laura Ludwig and Margareta Kozuch after losing that first set (23-25, 22-20, 16-14).

Even winning their Olympic debut after all three sets needed extra points to settle — in blistering heat and humidity — is, at best, mildly remarkable for top-tier professionals.

What they did was remarkable because getting to the Olympics is remarkable. Any Olympics. But these Olympics more than most. On some level, everyone knows this. But we know it on a macro level, the way we know running a marathon is remarkable without knowing exactly what goes into running 26.2 miles. Saturday, I understood. After five years of web streams, scoreboard refreshes and occasional days in the hot sun — after five years of being a fan — I understood how two remarkable athletes got there.

Beach volleyball captured me in the 2016 Olympics. I was in Rio de Janeiro, which apparently is to beach volleyball what Paris is to restaurants. I also wasn’t as busy as expected as those Olympics carried on, the U.S. soccer team having bowed out in the quarterfinals and my employer sadly ambivalent about stories on Dzsenifer Maroszan and the remaining teams. Watching volleyball replays and reading stories became a routine on the long bus rides to the Maracana.

Among the first revelations was that Switzerland played beach volleyball. Yes, that Switzerland. In fact, the decidedly landlocked mountainous country didn’t just play — it had two women’s teams in Rio. Having spent one of the best stretches of my life studying in Switzerland many years ago (without ever seeing a sand volleyball court that I can recall), I couldn’t help but adopt the Swiss and their quirky mismatched marriage of geography, climate and sport.

It’s not as if Switzerland is a powerhouse in indoor volleyball, which might logically feed the beach success that has seen it amass one of the best Olympic qualification records among countries beyond the obvious giants like Brazil and the United States. The Swiss are just really good in the sand.

Among my biggest regrets is I never could talk ESPN into letting me dive into the story of why. But current Swiss Olympian Anouk Vergé-Dépré once proposed (after I hijacked an interview ostensibly about Kerri Walsh Jennings’ then-latest project) that it may be a perfect storm of early success leading to locals staging the annual FIVB Major in Gstaad, which in turn birthed a generation of beach talent. (She and partner Joanna Heidrich, whose brother is also in these Olympics, also won their opener Saturday).

Stefan Kobel and Patrick Heuscher won bronze in the men’s competition in the 2004 Olympics, the best of four trips to at least the quarterfinals for Swiss men’s or women’s teams. That’s half as many as Germany, a country with roughly 10 times as many people.

“Players who were dreaming about competing internationally indoors went to beach because indoors is not that big in Switzerland,” Vergé-Dépré said. “And it’s another lifestyle indoors.”

She was laughing as she said the last bit, as you might, too, if your office was often a beach instead the fluorescent lighting and floor burns of some second-rate gym.

I still think that’s a story worth at least a few thousand words, if anyone is taking pitches.

But both Swiss teams from the 2016 Olympics broke up after the tournament, both Vergé-Dépré and Heidrich losing a partner to retirement before the two holdovers teamed up. Getting in on the ground floor as a fan of a new team was appealing, all the more after discovering Betschart. She seemed like a phenom. How else to describe someone who won junior world titles in 2011 and 2012 — when she was 15 and 16 years old, respectively, in an event that was open to players as old as 21? Sign me up.

The nuances of beach volleyball strategy are still largely beyond me. Not as much as five years ago, to be sure, but enough to leave me well aware of my ignorance. It doesn’t matter. The sport is narrative heaven. It is a perfect blend of team and individual. There aren’t any role players. There is nowhere to hide on a bad day. It’s all the spotlight and pressure of an individual sport like tennis with all the demands of the teamwork necessary in the sports I more often covered. The mental pressure of partnerships that last longer than some marriages is profoundly interesting.

The sport is full of compelling characters. Vergé-Dépré working to get a players union up and running. Humana-Paredes learning from a father who came to Canada from Chile amid the calamitous Pinochet years and helped build Canadian beach volleyball into a legitimate power. Dutch standout Sanne Keizer returning from a four-year retirement and traveling the world the past four years, often with her kids in tow, to chase another Olympic opportunity. And on and on.

No rooting interest is necessary to find much of it fascinating. But in the case of Betschart and Hüberli, it was fun to be a fan again. I root for Fulham, but that’s largely self-inflicted misery. I root for the Danish national teams in soccer, but they don’t play very often. Rooting for Betschart and Hüberli is a chance to be irrational again after years of trying to be rational (if still often wrong) about sports.

Betschart and Hüberli on familiar ground after a match in Gstaad (2019)

Forgive the soccer analogy in lieu of a good volleyball comparison, but Betschart is a hybrid of N’golo Kante and Julie Ertz. She’s a defensive marvel, reading plays and digging the ball. But like Ertz, she’s also coiled aggression and power waiting to be turned loose. She goes for broke, whether exploding into spikes or deftly going for the tightest of angles on fluttered cut shots.

Hüberli is like a Sam Mewis, this seemingly genial, lanky soul who transforms into a multi-faceted warrior on the court.

Plus, her mom runs a small restaurant. Or cafe. I’ll be honest, I’m not entirely sure. It’s sometimes difficult to follow social media posts in German. But come on, that’s fun.

They didn’t make it out of pool play the first time I saw them in person in Fort Lauderdale in 2017, their second year together (although they finished third in a five-star event later that year). Even my untrained eye could see a work in progress, Hüberli still just 24 and Betschart only 21. From the start, they had chemistry. The only bad body language from either was after her own mistake — never after a partner’s error. They were easy to root for that way. But each was also clearly her own worst critic, one error leading to another miscue and a set suddenly getting away from them. That changed quickly.

By 2018, they made an unforgettable run to the gold-medal match in the European Championship before finishing second.

In 2019, they made it to the semifinals of Gstaad, signaling their arrival as at least the equals of Swiss counterparts Vergé-Dépré and Heidrich (Betschart’s youth world titles came alongside Heidrich in 2011 and Vergé-Dépré a year later).

Runners-up in a recent tournament in Sochi, Russia, Betschart and Hüberli are legitimate contenders to medal in Tokyo, if not quite in the group of favorites that includes Brazilians Agatha and Duda, Canadians Melissa Humana-Paredes and Sarah Pavan and Americans April Ross and Alix Klineman. Some in Midwestern states where such things are now legal may even have placed a small wager on a medal. Out of hope if not absolute conviction.

It was a pleasure to see two athletes realize a dream Saturday morning. It made it all the sweeter to understand all the waking hours they spent earning the chance.