Moguls champ Roberts recovers from near-disaster

	Nate Roberts won the moguls and dual moguls crowns at the U.S. Freestyle Championships in Park City, Utah, in March. Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images
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For an athlete who spends his professional career navigating obstacles that come at him with rapid-fire redundancy, it's ironic that for one memorable evening last August, Nate Roberts' favorite expression was simply: "Hit me."

With little restraint, the world champion moguls skier took his raw ambition to the blackjack tables with hopes of hitting a roll. After all, a life of training with no guarantees of money or medals is a gamble and, well, you can probably get better odds at the tables than in an Olympic career.

And so, Roberts, 22, sat down at the Treasure Island casino in Las Vegas with teammate Jaret "Speedy" Peterson, the reigning World Cup champion aerialist, and began to draw cards. Five hours and more than a few 21s later, the pair turned a few hundred dollars into $230,000 each. Roberts, who had been making somewhere in the neighborhood of $20,000 per year, suddenly had a windfall of training expenses paid for.

In a few months, Roberts will try to put his cards on the table again in Turin at the 2006 Olympics. But even that isn't a given. Considering the wealth of mogul skiers in the U.S., this may be the deepest Olympic team the country has in any sport. Jeremy Bloom, 23, Travis Cabral, 22, Travis Mayer, 22, and Toby Dawson, 26, all have at least one World Cup title on their resumes, and there aren't enough medals to go around.

"People always pay attention to alpine events," says Roberts. "But we've come a long way and all of us can be on the podium."

Roberts' run toward a medal has been as fast on the snow as it was at the table. He was on skis at age 3 and in moguls competitions at 7 in Park City, Utah. One local paper once ran the headline: "Nate the Great Who's Eight." Two years later, he incorporated aerials practice into his ski repertoire but feared the big jump gone wrong.

"I was scared of landing on my back and not having that consistent feeling on the snow," he says. "Mostly I liked going fast, and I'm kind of afraid of heights, if you can believe it."

Roberts never took to the level turns of alpine racing or the flights of aerials, though he would combine elements of each into his moguls skiing, a blend of speed and hiccup-quick reactions to the changing terrain in front of him.