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By GLENN JORDAN, Staff Writer Saturday, March 17, 2007

FORT KENT - When you come right down to it, this is all Walt's fault.

If Walt Shepard hadn't been a freshman on the Yarmouth High School ski team competing in the 1998 Class C state championships in Aroostook County, his dad might not have dreamed up the Maine Winter Sports Center. And biathlon might still be a foreign concept in Aroostook County.

"That's the way my dad tells the story," Shepard said Friday during a break in the North American and U.S. Biathlon Championships, which resume this morning at the 10th Mountain Ski Center and conclude Sunday. "Obviously, it's his vision and his dream, but it's something we both discovered together -- what a great winter paradise this area was."

A few hours earlier, Andy Shepard and three colleagues had announced another feather in The County's hat: The International Biathlon Union has awarded Fort Kent another World Cup event, scheduled for March 12-15, 2009.

The son's vision was a tad different. Walt Shepard dreamed of becoming an Olympic biathlete. In an effort to do so, he spent a high school year at a skiing academy in Sweden, deferred admission to Middlebury College twice and entered last winter's Olympic Trials feeling as if he could grab one of four available spots on the U.S. team bound for Italy.

Instead, he finished ninth.

"It was heartbreaking for me not to make the Olympic team," he said. "But I was completely on board with the idea that I was going to be doing biathlon for the next four years."

He competed at one more event in Europe, then returned home to Yarmouth and put away his .22-caliber Anschutz rifle. It remained in hibernation for 14 months while Shepard changed course. He enrolled at Bowdoin College in the fall, joining the Class of 2010 five years after his graduation from Yarmouth High.

He didn't completely give up the Olympic dream. He simply came to accept the notion that college and biathlon could coexist, that his life could have some balance. After all, two of the 2006 U.S. Olympic biathletes, Lowell Bailey and Carolyn Treacy, were recent graduates of Vermont and Dartmouth, respectively.

"It's absolutely my goal and biggest dream to still make the Olympics," Shepard said. "I'll still be giving that a shot in 2010, only I'll be that much farther along toward my degree."

For Shepard's 24th birthday, his Bowdoin nordic skiing teammates presented him with a cane. They call him Old Man.

He's living on campus with three roommates, albeit upperclassmen. He traveled the Ski Carnival circuit with Bowdoin, leaving Thursdays and returning Saturday nights. He cheered on the Polar Bears women's basketball team, "the gem of Bowdoin athletics," he said.

"Socially, I'm not as active as the average freshman," he said with a grin. "But I've really enjoyed it. There's a lot of smart people at Bowdoin. It's given me an opportunity to get the rust off the cogs upstairs."

As an added bonus, Shepard discovered that he wasn't worrying about rifles, targets and ski wax while cogitating on Macroeconomics, Calculus, The Emergence of Modern Japan and -- coincidentally -- Sustaining Maine's Northern Forests.

By the time he returned Thursday morning to the starting gate at the 10th Mountain Ski Center -- for five loops of four kilometers interrupted by two prone and two standing stages of shooting at five targets -- he was rejuvenated.

In his second prone stage, he cleaned -- or knocked down -- all five targets, in rapid succession.

"I got down on the mat and it all came back," he said, still relishing the moment. "That was the most satisfying part of the race, hands down. Then when I crossed the line, when I saw what a few more hits would have done, I remembered how frustrating biathlon is. But it was a lot of fun."

With six missed targets giving him six minutes in penalties, Shepard finished fourth overall and second among U.S. men in the 20K individual, one minute behind Duncan Douglas, a 1994 U.S. Olympian, and two behind winner David Leoni of Alberta, Canada. The top four U.S. men are in Siberia, competing in the final event on the World Cup schedule.

The top U.S. Junior on Thursday was 19-year-old Newt Rogers of Fort Kent, a freshman at the University of Vermont who remembered moving to the St. John Valley as a 12-year-old, before the Maine Winter Sports Center arrived, bringing this odd marriage of target shooting and cross country skiing.

"There was absolutely nothing to do here for the first three years I lived here," Rogers said.

Now he, like Shepard, is good enough to dream about the Vancouver Olympics coming in 2010. There are more of them throughout The County -- and now from southern Maine, which is sending 18 promising youngsters culled from a series of recent Maine Winter Sports Center biathlon clinics at the L.L. Bean Discovery Center to participate in this afternoon's Citizens Race.

"It's clear Maine is an epicenter of biathlon," Shepard said. "My dad had an idea, but I don't think he ever expected it would get this big."

Staff Writer Glenn Jordan can be contacted at 791-6425 or at: