Moseley settled for the silver medal, while Vincent Dorion took bronze.

Cusson, a member of the unofficial New Canadian Air Force, was second to Moseley after each of the first two rounds, trailing the Olympian by three full points.

But when he stepped to the starting gate for the third time, he had something in mind.

	Cusson's creative final attempt wowed the judges and the crowd.

"I knew I couldn't beat Jonny Moseley with my same old jumps," Cusson said afterward, "so I had to do something new, something nobody had done today -- switch take off and switch landing, and I think the judges really liked it."

Cusson turned backward on the runway and took off facing uphill with designs on pulling off a 720. He had completed the trick in demonstrations and while filming movies, but he'd never tried it in competition.

After launching himself from the ramp, he performed two complete rotations and stuck the landing, skiing backward down the hill.

"I was so surprised, because I was a little bit sketchy in the air, and I wasn't sure if I was going to stick it," Cusson said. "But then, boom -- perfect."

The jump earned Cusson 83 points -- the highest single-jump score of the day -- and moved him past Moseley and into first place. Five skiers later, only Moseley still had a shot at snatching gold from Cusson's grasp.

	Cusson surprised even himself with his gold-medal winning jump.

"There was two options for me," Moseley said. "It was either do something a little different to try to beat him, or do what I was doing bigger and better."

Moseley had forged his first-place position with two stellar jumps, scoring 79.00 and 79.75 -- the two best scores of the day through two rounds. But he chose to go for quality over quantity on his final attempt, and he almost pulled it off.

"I elected to not do anything different and to just go bigger and do the trick a little better," Moseley said, "and I just bummed the landing. But I was close enough in the score that I didn't have to do something spectacular, I just had to get a little better score than than the one before."

Moseley was both big and smooth in the air, and he was on his way to a possible gold-medal winning score, but he skidded on the landing and registered only 76.25 with the judges. His final combined score of 79.38 left him 1.50 points behind Cusson.

"That's just the way it goes," Moseley said afterward. "I went big, and I compressed real hard. I'm psyched, I mean J.F. deserves to win. He did some crazy stuff up there. Second place is fine with me."