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.

In late 2003, Roberts jumped from the U.S. “C” team to its “A” team after winning a World Cup competition in Madonna, Italy, not far from the Olympic site in February. It was a whirlwind week for Roberts, whose skis got lost in Customs and didn’t arrive until just before the event.

With little time to practice, he performed a straight-legged backflip with a full twist as one of his jumps during his second run. Until Roberts introduced it, it was a jump previously reserved for aerial events in which skiers accelerated down a smooth runway, preparing only to jump, rather than moguls events in which skiers have already taxed their wind dancing through a course blistered with bumps. The FIS, the international skiing governing body, hadn’t even allowed off-axis tricks until 2002 when Jonny Moseley, then the defending Olympic champ, debuted a skill known as “the dinner roll.”

Two weeks after his victory in Madonna, Roberts attempted the signature jump again at an event in Mont Tremblant, near Montreal. But as he feared when he first started learning aerials, he landed on his back, suffering bruised ribs, a bone bruised tailbone and a wrenched sacroiliac joint in a nasty crash. He remembers not being able to breathe.

“It was important to get back quickly,” he recalls. “I didn’t want the accident in my mind for too long.”

Two weeks later, he placed second in a dual moguls event in Fernie, British Columbia. This year he has landed a double backflip in practice, a skill that will not be allowed in Turin because the FIS will not permit mogul skiers to use new tricks in an Olympic year. He has jumped triple backflips into a pit of water.

Even without those skills, he has already topped loaded fields this season at both in Ruka, Finland, where he won his first world moguls gold medal, and at the U.S. Nationals near his home in Park City, where he won both the moguls and dual moguls crowns.

“Highs and lows,” he says. “I still think about walking away from that crash, how lucky I’ve been.”

With his luck, Roberts still has some good chips left to play.