It was a shot across the bow, and the snowboarder Billy Morgan played the part of cannonball, wearing all black while tucking and somersaulting through the air more than 100 feet from a specially constructed jump made of snow at a resort in Livigno, Italy.
This was in April 2015, when Morgan, of Britain, landed a backside quadruple cork 1800, a marvel of physics and rotational forces consisting of four off-axis back flips and six spins compressed into three seconds of hang time.