FORT KENT, Maine – The Fort Kent Outdoor Center saw increased attendance, including U.S. National Guard athletes from as far as Alaska to the Virgin Islands, as it hosted the Eastern Regional Biathlon Cup #4 last weekend.
The regional cup was hosted at the Fort Kent Outdoor Center, a facility that also hosts the larger US Biathlon National Championships event. It most recently hosted the event in 2024. And while the regional cup is generally not as big an event, Fort Kent Outdoor Center Director Carl Theriault said it has been seeing more and more participation from athletes, and that this weekend’s event saw more than 100 athletes altogether.
“We’re seeing much larger numbers,” he said. “In years past if we had an event like this we might see 35 athletes. Well, now we’ve got 120.”
It is getting close to the participation numbers for the larger US National event, which had about 170 athletes.
Full results are available on the Zone4 race timing website. Fort Kent’s own Alden Reardon, who became the first in the ski team’s history to win four consecutive individual state victories as well as four consecutive state victories with the high school ski team, also received the best times in the youth men’s category. His time for the Saturday morning sprint was 25:52.6 and his unofficial time for the Sunday morning individual results was 38:41.8.
Athletes also came from Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and New York.
At first, he said the National Guard alone had committed 120 athletes, but the guard had to reduce its expected number of athletic participants because of the war in Iran. The facility has built a relationship with the U.S. National Guard over the years, as many troops come up to the facility to train.
“They just love coming up, just to get away to a different environment and do some quality training,” he said.
The regional biathlon was originally scheduled for late January, but Theriault said it had to be moved to late March due to unusually low temperatures of roughly 35 degrees below zero. He said it is the first time the facility has ever had to postpone an event.
“And it was just because it was too darn cold out,” he said. “The wind was bad, and it was a nasty weekend.”
Theriault said he spoke with his contact at the National Guard about coming to Fort Kent on the new date in March, and they were able to attend. National Guard Major General Diane Dunn, who serves as the 41st Adjutant General of the Maine National Guard, also came up to attend, which Theriault said has also never happened before.
“She came up by helicopter, got to know a lot of the guard units and was just really supportive and enthusiastic about the whole thing,” Theriault said.
In addition to the roughly 120 athletes, approximately 90 volunteers worked to support the event and to make sure everything went smoothly, Theriault said.
The series of regional events will allow athletes to compete without needing to get on a plane to head out west, Theriault said. There are now two sites in the US and Canada each for this four-event series, and Theriault said they’re hoping to expand it to six events next year.
Another aspect of this is to help strengthen the outdoor center and town’s relationship with Canada as there are athletes on both sides of the border, and Fort Kent and other surrounding towns depend on cross-border trade.
“At a time when the U.S. and Canada are having problems, politically, at the higher levels, I think it’s really important that we continue to operate this way,” Theriault said. “We try to build those relationships with our neighbors to the north, and this is one of those efforts that’s really working.”
