Biathlon Rifle Question

I've been able to watch a few of the more interesting events and noticed something in the Biathlon competitions that had me wondering.

During one of the Men's events, I noticed the shooter had to load each round (the bullets were held in a special mount on the stock for easy access, one guy had a hell of a time loading it), then when watching a Womens match, the rifles were magazine fed needing only a short, sweet bolt charge to load it.

Just wondering why that is? That is one tough sport, ski your ass off then stop, steady yourself and hit five targets, with 5 shots, as fast as you can with your heart about ready to pop!

I didn't get to watch them all but most of them just collapsed on the track after finishing, totally exhausted.

Time to identify as a woman so they can use a dang magazine!

One of the biathlon variants allows you five shots for five targets. If you have a miss, you may manually load up to 3 (?) more rounds to try and hit all the targets. So they probably fired their five from a magazine, and what you saw was the after-effect of one or more misses.

Another variant you ONLY get five shots and for every miss you have to ski a loop to slow you down.

I think that's how it works...

O2