The biathlon professionals Dzinara Alimbekava and Anton Smolski are expecting offspring. The Olympic champion will therefore not be at the start next winter.
After their wedding last winter, the biathletes Dzinara Alimbekava and Anton Smolski are looking forward to their next private happiness: the two Belarusians will have a boy in early 2024, as they announced on Instagram.
A video shows how the winter sports enthusiasts, who have been so successful in recent years, find out which gender the offspring will have. When Smolski sees the blue smoke, he cheers exuberantly and hugs his wife. “There will be more Smolkis. We are waiting for our boy,” the biathlete wrote under the post.
Dzinara Alimbekava will therefore certainly not start in the coming season – anyway, the couple has been missing from the Biathlon World Cup since the outbreak of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine and the resulting sanctions against athletes from Russia and Belarus.
Biathletes from Russia and Belarus still excluded from the World Cup
Until then, the 27-year-old was one of the best ski hunters in the world. The Kazakh native won the gold medal with the Belarusian relay at the 2018 Winter Olympics. In the 2020/21 and 2021/22 seasons she finished seventh in the overall World Cup rankings, and in the 21/22 season she even reached third place. She won her only World Cup victory in December 2020 in the Hochfilzen sprint.
26-year-old Anton Smolski is also a successful biathlete: in 2022 he won the individual silver medal at the Beijing Winter Olympics. In the overall ranking of his last World Cup season to date, 2021/22, he was 19th.
For the coming World Cup season, Russian and Belarusian biathletes are still excluded for the time being.