Well this is a weird interest I have. I'll proceed to explain this sport I'm fond of below. Is it on US TV? Nope. You have to download an app (but it is free!). Are the Americans good? Not really. But is it entertaining? Occasionally. I'll explain why. But did it inspire me to take up cross-country skiing? It did!
Biathlon is a strange amalgamation of two different disciplines: cross-country skiing and target shooting. I was going to look into the history but I assume it emerged from the Norwegian/Swedish/German armies, who at some point needed to train their soldiers to ski and shoot.
It's one of those weird sports in the Winter Olympics where you're like "oh yeah...forgot about that for the last three and a half years". But! It does have a regular season every winter, with about a dozen different stops around Europe, with the occasional jaunt to North America (the next time they will go to the US and Canada is in 2029). And these locations tend not to be in big cities. Finland's biathlon course is in a small town nearly three hundred miles from Helsinki, on the Russian border. Sweden's course is about 350 miles from both Oslo and Stockholm. I'm certainly cherry picking, but these are typical stops on the World Cup circuit, and they are not convenient.
During each stop, there are a few different races. It varies every year and every stop, but they have different forms of racing. I'll lay them out, but broadly they fall into two buckets - individual and relay. They vary by distance and who is skiing, but the larger variation is how the race is run. Some races are against the clock, so the final standings aren't known until the last biathlete completes the course. Others are raced with all of the teams starting at or near the same time. The relays are done by national teams, and either four members of the same gender or a mixed man/woman two person relay.
What really makes biathlon shine is how the shooting shakes out. For longer races, there will be four shooting pauses, for shorter races two. The biathletes will either be shooting laying down (prone) or standing up (standing). For the four shooting races, they alternate so that they don't do two prone shootings in a row. The targets are larger for standing and smaller for prone.
The biathletes will do laps around the course, pausing to shoot at the range, and then continuing on. The courses have a variety of trails and loops they send the biathletes on, to get the exact kilometers required and ensure that the number of shooting pauses is correct for that type of race. It's structured so that a lap is completed before the first shooting, and then they go back out on the course. Usually there's a shorter lap time to get back to the finish after the final shooting stage, but it can depend on the course.
It cannot be emphasized how difficult this is do to. You have just skiied a long distance, your heart rate is in the red zone, and now you are laying on a mat laid on top of the snow, and have to calm your breathing as you look through an unaugmented tiny rifle and try to hit something that looks like it's a few inches across.
They shoot across five targets in each shooting pause. For every miss, they either have to ski a penalty lap or in longer races, a minute is added to their time.
It is unquestionably, a weird sport, that only the precise, rules based Europeans would come up with. A sport like this would never have manifested in the US. It would have withered away as TV viewers stared blankly as they waited another 45 minutes for the rest of the field to complete their runs. More spectator friendly types of racing have been added since it began, but at its core it's a sport that is technical and niche.
And yet somehow very popular in Europe. The key thing is the shooting stages. A fast skiier can come in and blow a lead by missing two targets. By the same token, a shooter with few misses can lose a race by not skiing fast enough. The unpredictability makes it exciting.
I first really got into this when my first kid was born. He was a preemie born in December and once we managed to keep him home, I was sent out of our bedroom with the truculent child at some terrible hour. And lo and behold, what do you think was on the now shuttered Olympic channel? As I sat and watched over the course of a long weekend, I thought "this is kind of fun?"
Despite my writing this during a summer's heatwave, I'm excited for the next season! Something to look forward to, on a cold winter morning.