In this talk, I will share my personal experiences of success factors and possible pitfalls in the knowledge translation between research and practice in elite sport. With a background as an elite cross-country skier and with coaching-experience of skiers on a high international level, I had a relatively good point of departure for beginning my research career in the applied field with a Ph.D. focused on cross-country skiing. There was already a common respect between the athletes, their coaches and me. I knew the "tribal language" and had a continuous dialogue on what type of knowledge would be of interest to the coaches. This dialogue provided the basis for my research questions and allowed a relatively easy access to perform high-quality research on world-class athletes. At the same time, my supervisors and research colleagues had a different, but complementary, view on the same questions, a quality that assured the process from a scientific point of view. My first studies focused on the physiology of sprint skiing, where main coach of the national team, Ulf Morten Aune, allowed me to perform multiple experiments on his successful team. World- and Olympic champion Tor-Arne Hetland, was my main pilot tester and discussion partner. This process provided practical relevance, whereas scientific quality was assured by my supervisors Professor Gertjan Ettema and Professor H-C Holmberg. Indeed, the combination of working closely with some of the best coaches and athletes and world-leading scientists was a unique advantage for my learning process. Different challenges occurred later in my research career, when I worked with other types of sports where I lacked the practical understanding and did not have the natural intuition about the sport. In such cases, the process resulted in the best "working climate" when it was facilitated by another person, a "translator" who understood the sport well and worked closely with coaches and athletes on a daily basis. Awareness of my own role and a common respect for the different points of departure were key factors for success, and has helped us to avoid stepping into pitfalls on this journey. In order to further reinforce the success factors for combining high quality research with world-class athlete support, we moved our own research centre to the top sport facilities in Granåsen, where we share the location with employees of Olympiatoppen and are close to the athletes` natural training arena. We believe that the common lunch area is the most important room in the house, since this is where common respect and understanding is built between researchers and coaches/athletes in a friendly environment. Here, we designed new experiments together and knowledge is implemented through an ongoing dialogue at the training arena, in the laboratory and in the lunch area. In addition, we have prioritized communication through coach education programs, coach education literature and popular science papers, which has been of importance in this context. As researchers we must pay close attention to the practically based knowledge of coaches and athletes, which is often ahead of what current research can prove. Many of their ideas and comments have led to new hypotheses, and many of their questions could not be answered at that point. Thus, the questions were highly relevant, so-called research GAPs that sometimes were developed into high quality scientific studies. This process should be a two-way process of "knowledge translation" where practical and scientifically based knowledge are regarded complementary. Shooting performance is a crucial component for the overall result in biathlon competitions. The knowledge about the effects of various shooting-specific capacities on shooting performance would be of high value for coaches and athletes. Thus, the aim of the current study was to compare biathlon-specific shooting tests between competitive biathletes on different performance levels.
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