Who is who, was something meant to be bolded there? Which part of the post are you referring to?
I am taking about speed, no shooting involved. You won’t see many missing 3 or 4 and still winning, even getting on the podium. Stina hasn’t skied as well on the biathlon circuit as she did in cross country, you can visually see that. Remember that she had a groin injury when she lunged for the line in the Otepaa sprint in January 2019. She recovered well enough to make an impact in Seefeld and finished the season strong, winning the mini tour in Quebec, but the following season was not great and actually she raced sparingly, ending her xc career at the end of the season. A rift with the Swedish federation and likely wanting to try something different AND the better prize money in biathlon played big roles in her switch.
In Herrmann’s case, I bet the decision was mostly due to being frustrated with a lack of results due to simply not being good enough. The money as well.
I think for Stina it was also that she just wasn't
needed in XC anymore. A couple of season earlier and the team is still very dependent on her for results, but with Dahlqvist, Sundling, Karlsson, Andersson, Ribom et al all coming through, if she didn't come back from her injury at full strength she mightn't even commandeer a place in the team at all anymore and would be trading being a fringe person in a sport where she is expected to star for being a fringe person in a sport where people expect her to take time to adapt so the pressure is less. She was still a good cross-country skier but nothing like what she had been. Also as that was the side of the sport they expected her to excel in, she spent far more time on the shooting in the off-season and did not do so much work on the skiing, and it showed.
In Herrmann's case yes, I think she'd got as far as she could in XC, and with far more interest and funding in biathlon in Germany, it was worth it for her to risk the shooting because even if it didn't work she'd still have been Germany's best XC skier if she went back, until more or less now with Hennig only surpassing the kind of level Denise was at relatively recently. I think similar is behind the choice of Lampič, exacerbated by being at odds with the Slovenian ski federation. But worth noting that the race today was a 7,5km - of course Lampič was best in sprints, but the shorter biathlon races perhaps have most in common with a team sprint in freestyle, something that Anamarija was pretty good at. We shall see when it comes to the head to head races, where shooting is under far more pressure (that tends to be a major factor for converts, when everybody is shooting faster all around you) and if she does some Individuals where the distance is double whether she can sustain that kind of advantage because it's typically outside of her remit in XC, which it hadn't been for Herrmann or Nilsson.