Dual moguls is new to the Olympics this year. It's head-to-head heats, with skiers facing moguls, gates, and jumps—and being judged, head-to-head, on each element for a combined score. In the men's medal rounds today, Japan's Ikuma Horishima (pictured above, sort of) had a disastrous run in his round-of-16 showdown, and somehow ended up facing the wrong way. That's an odd and very specific sort of adversity to overcome, but he did it.
Here he is soaring fully out of control on his final jump:
And he here is, tumbling ass over teakettle after crashing on the landing.
So, how did Horishima win this heat, let alone survive to win several more and end up on the podium? To his great luck, the other skier in the heat, the U.S.'s Nick Page, veered off-course for an immediate DQ. Horishima just had to finish to advance, but he made an adventure of it:
That's Olympic excellence. Horishima would win two more rounds (crossing the finish line facing forward both times) before losing in the final to Mikaël Kingsbury, who won Canada's first gold medal of these Games.
"Honestly, the slopes in the single and dual certainly weren't the ones that I excel at," Horishima said. Sometimes it doesn't matter how you get down the mountain, as long as you do.
