There's more to that though, related to the systems Pichler inherited there. The Russian system is quite rigid owing to the large number of biathletes competing for places and their historic depth and regional systems. Races like the national championships at season's end and the important Christmas Russian Cup races in Izhevsk set the team for following sections of the season, and rigid performance criteria are in place, which meant that Pichler was unable to do his ground-up development processes. After she destroyed the field in the 2013 Junior Worlds at the youth level, Pichler wanted to train Kaisheva (who was there in Pyeongchang with OAR) with the World Cup A-team, but was told that there was no room for her and as a Junior-age athlete she would continue to train with the other Juniors. You then have the other politics about selections, there's a lot of factionalism with regional sports authorities and coaches in competition with one another for the available spots. With their expectations and their depth, it's hard for young athletes to get extended runs in the team at the top level because there's always somebody capable waiting in the wings, so they couldn't treat Kaisheva as a project like the French did with Braisaz or the Germans did with Dahlmeier.
When Pichler returned to the Swedish team, there was little choice other than to gamble on youth. Ekholm and Olofsson-Zidek were but a memory and nobody had replaced them. With Ferry and Bergman leaving the men's team, there was little bar Lindström to shout about among the men either. Athletes who had reached their development ceiling and were getting minor World Cup points were therefore marginalized in favour of younger athletes who would not get the same results now but who would hopefully get better results in the future. Some, like Jenny Jonsson, retired, others like Elisabeth Högberg fought tooth and nail to prove the coaches wrong and that she could still offer something. The team lost starters but persistence began to pay off last season as the likes of Anna Magnusson and Hanna Öberg started stringing together decent results. Hanna's been out for much of the early season here, but both she and Samuelsson were seen as good prospects and have had decent enough results in World Cup races before, just not to the level shown here. When Pichler was with the Russians, the default position was to back experience, as they could score more points, but that stifled young athletes from settling at the World Cup in favour of athletes for whom a top 30 was usually the best they could hope for - plus the more experienced athletes knew better how to work form for the selection races, marginalising young talent due to the rigidness of the system because the good performances in those selection races came with race start guarantees as a reward, whereas the default with Pichler's Swedish team has been to back potential over immediate performance as they did not have any reliable sources of good enough results to be able to settle for those lower end points.
The Swedish results at Pyeongchang have been well above expectations, of course, but there are enough differences in the sports bureaucracies of Russia and Sweden that directly comparing Pichler's Russians in Sochi with his Swedes in Pyeongchang is hard to call fair.
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