Armenia second in world tank biathlon championship

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Armenia second in world tank biathlon championship –

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ARKA – The Russian team has taken lead in the 2014 Tank Biathlon World Championship, which kicked off yesterday at a testing ground outside Moscow.

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Tank crews from 12 countries are participating in the newly introduced global military sporting event. Russia is now followed by Armenia, Kazakhstan, Serbia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, India, China, Mongolia and Kuwait.

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 Lieutenant-General Yuri Petrov, a deputy head of the Russian Defense Ministry’s main department of combat training, said

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 that these were the results of the first day of the competition. The final results of the first stage will be decided on August 6.

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 Only three teams – from Russia, Armenia and China – managed to complete the distance without penalty laps, Petrov said. 

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Participants in the competition had to particularly battle three types of obstacles, namely mound, track path at mine explosion area and a hillside, he said.

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 The biathlon runs through August 16 and is divided into three stages of three heats each, the Russian Defense Ministry said. The championship’s second stage, which is 3km Sprint, runs on August 8-9 and the third stage, which is Pursuit, runs on August 11-12.

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Teams have to race through up to 20km obstacle course in Russian-made T-72B tanks, or Slingshot, according to NATO classification, and fire at targets imitating tanks and helicopters. Crews that miss a target get a penalty lap. China brought its own 96A tanks for the championship.

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 The Tank Biathlon, which is analogous to the Olympic biathlon discipline, was invented by the Russian military and the first competition at the international level was held in August 2013 in Alabino with the participating crews from Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia.

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