More Europeans tune in to watch biathlon than Americans do for the Superbowl, yet while NFL team jerseys can be had in Oslo and Frankfurt, US biathletes are almost unknown back home.

"It's not that people don't like it," said the top-ranked United States biathlete Tim Burke. "It's that they don't even know about it."

Burke and his team-mates came to Russia with the biathlon World Cup to toil in obscurity, skiing and shooting and competing for experience, dreaming of the day when their sport gains recognition at home.

"It's going to take a medal at the Olympics or something like that to show the American public what it's all about," said Burke, 25.

Biathlon is simple: ski, shoot, sling rifle and repeat. The winners are not necessarily the fastest skiers or the truest shots but the ones who best combine the two skills.

The sport's king is 34-year-old Norwegian Ole Einar Bjorndalen, whose nine Olympic medals, 29 world championship podiums and five seasons atop the World Cup standings lead many to dub him the Michael Jordan of biathlon.

By comparison, Burke had two top-10 finishes at the world championships in Sweden this year, the highest ever for an American. He was ranked 25th in the World Cup standings at the end of last season.

Three core events make up a weekend of biathlon: the sprint - three short loops of the ski course and two chances to shoot at five targets, with athletes starting at 30-second intervals in a format similar to a bicycle time trial.

Then the pursuit - a race of five laps with two prone and two standing shoots, with start intervals based on sprint finish times and victory going to the first across the line.

Finally the mass start - the 30 top pursuit finishers racing head-to-head, filled with all the drama, excitement and thrills of MotoGP or a one-day classic bike race.

In Khanty-Mansiysk, a relatively wealthy Russian oil town 2,300 km northeast of Moscow, thousands of fans gathered in a state-of-the-art stadium to stomp, cheer and roll out the Mexican wave for their skiing and shooting heroes.

Burke trains year-round with support from the US Biathlon Federation and said one of the big secrets to finishing well lay in "reading the snow" and figuring out which wax combination worked best on race day.

"That's really up to the wax technicians to decide what they think is going to happen," Burke said.

Andreas Emslander, the USBF's wax technician in Khanty-Mansiysk, scraped, sanded, stripped and tuned more than 60 pairs of skis for the weekend. He said teams closely guarded the exact wax formula used and started preparing days in advance.

"You start two days before the race. You take out five, six pairs - then you test," said Emslander, stepping out periodically to gauge the snow's temperature and moisture content.

"You start with normal paraffin wax, then build up... with hard layers, and then go softer and softer until you reach the actual weather conditions."

Burke came 31st in the pursuit at Khanty-Mansiysk, rising from 46th in the sprint, but he said a blowing, pre-race snowfall on the hilly track had made his ski wax choice sluggish.

"I made a pretty big mistake today," he said. "It's a little bit wetter than this morning. It made a big difference."

US coach Per Nillson said world-class biathletes could ski as fast as top Nordic competitors but had the added ability to withstand the pressure of shooting in competition.

"You need to be smart, and to control your mental skills when you come in to shooting. You need the physical capacity but then also this precision work," Nillson said.

Burke - who sat out the mass start and signed autographs for young Russian fans - agreed. He said biathlon's lack of popularity back home was a mixed bag of emotions.

"I'm over here six months a year dealing in these environments where it is recognised as a professional sport.

"Athletically it's one of the toughest sports to do and it would definitely be nice to have a little more recognition at home."

Reuters