A clear example of sport science.

February 18th 2026, the French women biathlon team wins the gold at the Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics. Besides celebrating my home country's success, I seize the moment to make it a first publication on this platform.

As it happens, their coach Cyril Burdet, besides from being a former youth international in biathlon is also holder of a PhD in neurophysiology.

While his and Patrice Rougier, his eminent co-researcher's work is rarely cited in coaching literature, their research about posture control has become foundational in biathlon shooting science and training design.

Over time, Burdet's work travelled from scientific protocols to research in context in biathlon to coaching methods.

Biathlon is a very demanding sport where posture control and concentration are critical.

Burdet and Rougier demonstrated that:

• posture is not automatic
• balance depends partly on attention and cognitive load
• when attention is engaged elsewhere, the body re-organizes muscular control to preserve stability.

Cyril Burdet, as the coach of the national biathlon team, has had then all the room to apply his findings to the authentic context of the constraint caused by shooting at a target while holding a standing posture. And all of this, right after the intense effort of skiing at a fast rate.

To let neuroscience enter through the door of biathlon coaching, Burdet demonstrated that posture is not automatically regulated by muscular patterns but by attention. Shooting accuracy has become a cognitive process at the same time as well as a technical skills.

Accuracy depends less on muscle control than on how the nervous system manages attention under physiological stress. A pure transdisciplinary model.