Mikkel Krause.
Mikkel Krause is the skip of the Danish men's national curling team, whose performance at the qualifying tournament, known as the OQE, secured their last possible qualification position for the top ten participants in the Beijing Olympics. The competition is now two-thirds over and Mikkel is still holding on to the last position among the skips with a slight gap, with his throw success rate at seventy-five percent. In comparison, the first Briton so far, Bruce Mouat, is at eighty-nine percent. But someone has to be on the tail and quite logically it should be the paper underdog. There's nothing strange about that. Still, Mikkel is to be commended for mastering an unusual moment. In Monday's game against Norway, the Danes were reaching for their first win when they had the last stone in the extra end and needed to play hit and stay open. Mikkel was ready in the bounce block and was already visualizing the path of the stone in his head when he realized something was wrong. Tilting the stone ninety degrees to a position where the bottom could be cleaned of any dirt, he found that the handle was spinning. This is a problem because it makes it impossible to give the stone rotation. Mikkel had to stand up, ask for a technical time-out and wait for the icemaker to arrive. The whole mental setup suddenly disappeared. After tightening the screw holding the handle on the stone, the match could continue. I was pretty worried about Krause. It looked to me like an intervention by a higher power trying to hand victory to the other side. But Mikkel did his part and with a completely accurate throw, he secured the Danes' first win at the 2022 Olympic tournament.