Mike Danforth

I never think, it looks like they're having fun.

It doesn't look fun the way you're doing it.

I don't know quite how to ask this, but one thing I'm curious about when I watch competitive skiing is it seems like the way you win is by pushing as close to the limit of failure as possible.

At any given time, how close are you to crashing?

That feels like good slang for me when I'm watching over the next couple of weeks.

He burritoed himself in the fence.

So you competed in the 2018 Games in Korea, where it was unusually cold.

Can you tell us some of the things you did to keep warm?

That there's a lot of nerves that are involved in making yourself go off a ski jump.

And if you're a little bit jet lagged, your nerves are calm, which allows you to kind of operate purely on muscle memory.

Wait, you missed a race you were supposed to be at?

I just think about, like, I've...

and been like five minutes late to a Zoom call.

But to miss a race at the Olympics, like what?

So when you realize what had happened...

Watching on television, the sounds you hear are really cool, like the scrape of the skis on the snow and the ice.

But are you grunting a lot during a giant slalom race?

There's some people who are known as grunters.

Yeah, I mean, there's always like the moment where I see the skiers get airborne.

And that feels like a real moment where a curse might come out, where maybe you got a little more air than you expected.