James Upham Quotations

What the other countries are doing, you just copy it. The system's easy. I steal all my training ideas from the Norwegians, OK? I steal all my shooting ideas from the Germans. It's not like it's that hard. It's very simple to do.

Now we have the best performance we've ever had in the Olympics. Bam! It's done. We did it on the first day. Now it takes the pressure off and we can just focus on improving the performance aspects.

You almost expect surprises in this type of a race. The skiing was so fast because you had this ice coming out of the sky, making really hard tracks. There isn't a huge gap in the skiing. You couldn't make more than a minute or two on anybody today. So the (good) shooters had a huge advantage, much more than normal.

You have to be Lance Armstrong and Babe Ruth.

You have to measure your success. There's 100 people in the race and only three get medals. We still have a young group. We have a couple veterans. So, we're focused on performances, not results.

Very rarely are they separated. Usually at the beginning of the training we do a couple of shootings separated so that gets them in their own rhythm and I can see all the shots. But then they work together the rest of the workout. They ski together, shoot together, test the skis together.

You medal is that far away. Half a bullet tip away.

The way they move is different but they're almost always within a second or two of ski time and shooting time, so the results are very similar. Any time we test heart rates or lactates or anything like that, it's almost the same. It's like testing the same person, same blood.

You don't get a rest before shooting. There's nowhere to take a break. People on TV will see it as a dinky little downhill before the shooting and think, 'Well, it's easy.' But you've just climbed up a kilometer up to there and you're totally wiped out by the time you get to the point.

It's brutal because we're at altitude, which makes any aerobic sport much harder. And just the way the course is set up, you're basically climbing an alpine hill up into the range.

It's been fun so far, but now it really gets fun.

If you're a cross-country skier or an endurance athlete, it's very simple: Here's a gun, go shoot this, too. Everyone would say, 'Yeah, that sounds cool to me. You get to ski around and then you get to shoot stuff every day. That sounds pretty fun.

I don't think they have an answer. They worked really hard the next day and he shot fine and there was nothing wrong with his rifle.