As the Winter Olympics get underway this week, the images will be familiar. Snow, speed, nerves, and the quiet tension of athletes waiting in the start gate. What is easier to miss is that the Games are not really about going as fast as possible. They are about choosing how fast is survivable. Few events expose that tension more clearly than men’s downhill skiing.

We saw it most clearly in 2018.

The start gate sat quiet longer than planned at the men’s downhill at the 2018 Winter Olympics. Wind moved across the top of Jeongseon, then faded, then came back again. Athletes shuffled, clicking skis in and out, trying to reconcile what they were seeing now with what they had inspected earlier. By the time the green light came on, the course was already different from the one they thought they knew.

Men’s downhill compresses everything. One run. No averages. No second chances. The logic seems simple. Take the fastest possible line and trust your execution. At this level, everyone can ski fast. What separates the field is how much risk they are willing to carry when the mountain stops behaving.

Every downhill course offers choices. There is a line that looks optimal in inspection. Straighter. Tighter. Less distance travelled. It assumes stable light, predictable snow, perfect timing. When those assumptions hold, it wins. When they don’t, the cost is immediate.

Several favourites committed to that line early. They skied aggressively, chasing hundredths that only exist if everything goes right. Small things intruded. A rut that wasn’t there before. Flatter light through a compression. A ski that grabbed for a split second too long. None of it dramatic. All of it expensive. At this speed, you do not recover what you lose.

At the highest level of alpine downhill, skiers routinely accept a crash probability measured in double digits for a theoretical gain of less than three tenths of a second. In other words, a meaningful chance of not finishing at all in exchange for time most TV viewers cannot see. Even informed fans underestimate how asymmetric that trade-off has become.

By the time Aksel Lund Svindal left the gate, the course had been marked by other people’s decisions. He was not chasing novelty. He had raced enough Olympic downhill runs to know the mountain rarely rewards plans that depend on stability.

His line was wider where others attacked. Earlier in its setup. Slightly slower on paper.

It did not look heroic. It looked deliberate. It allowed him to absorb what the course threw back. Where others corrected, he stayed ahead of the skis. Where conditions shifted, he still had room to respond. He crossed the line clean, intact, and eventually with a gold medal.

Afterwards, the explanations followed familiar grooves. Experience. Nerves. Temperament. All true, and all incomplete. The race was not won by courage or even technique. It was won by choosing a strategy that could survive variation.

The fastest line existed that day. Everyone could see it. It just was not the one that finished.

That distinction matters beyond sport. At the edge of performance, improvement becomes conditional. The final gains come from removing margin. Systems are tuned tighter. Buffers disappear. Assumptions about stability creep in. Everything looks efficient until something shifts.

You see this in products built for ideal users and confused by real ones. In algorithms that perform brilliantly on known data and collapse when inputs drift. In operations trimmed so lean they cannot absorb a shock. The pattern is the same as PyeongChang. A small, visible gain is chosen over an invisible margin that only matters under stress.

The mistake is not optimisation itself. It is forgetting where it stops paying rent. Past a certain point, you are no longer buying performance. You are buying fragility. The downside does not arrive gradually. It arrives all at once.

Businesses are not one-run events. They usually get more chances. But some moments behave like downhill finals. Flagship launches. Core infrastructure. Systems that operate autonomously and publicly. In those moments, recovery is slow and reputational damage is real.

Svindal did not ski timidly. He skied with a clear view of where failure became unrecoverable.

The mountain always answers back. The only choice is whether you have left yourself room to respond when it does.

📚 “Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder” by Nassim Taleb
Separate decision quality from outcome quality, especially when short-term results are noisy.

🗣️ “Only The Paranoid Survive” The Knowledge Project episode w/ Andy Grove
In volatile contexts, judgement and preparedness matter more than optimisation alone because unforeseen conditions can overwhelm perfectly tuned plans.

🧑‍💻 “Global Supply Chains in a Post Pandemic World” by HBR
Cutting slack to maximise efficiency increases fragility, as supply chains show when unplanned disruptions hit harder than anticipated.

Until next time

Business lessons from the world of sport