The Kiss a Seminal momment ||A total Accident

Gus Kenworthy was looking to better his surprise silver from the event's Olympic debut four years earlier in Russia and the skier was confident. Preparation had been very different this time around. Before Sochi 2014 he'd been "terrified of being outed" in a country where 'promotion of homosexuality' was illegal and had worried he might be chased out of the sport. Now the American was one of two openly gay men in the USA team. He'd been "so shocked" by the way the LGBT+ community and a plethora of sponsors had backed him after coming out in 2015 that he was desperate to thank them with success in Pyeongchang. Unfortunately, things didn't go to plan. But he still found himself at the centre of a dizzying global focus, for unexpected reasons. Kenworthy fell on his first run in the final and suffered a similar fate in the second, leaving him "devastated" as his Olympic medal bid ended. All he wanted was to quietly retreat to the comfort of family and friends, but his agent intervened and directed him towards the eager reporters desperate for his attention. Kenworthy was confused. "They were all going 'tell us about the kiss' and I had no idea what they were talking about," he tells BBC Sport. Without his knowledge, American broadcaster NBC had been filming him live as he spoke to family and kissed his boyfriend before heading up to the start. Thanks to the power of social media, the kiss became one of the most iconic images of the Games and was celebrated as a significant step towards the greater acceptance of the LGBT+ community within elite sport. "It was such a tame kiss says Kenworthy with a smile. "For sure I'd have made it more dramatic if I'd known it was going to be this big deal moment! "As a kid if I'd seen that it would have signalled to me that I was OK, that I was safe, there was a future for me. It would probably have saved me a lot of years of heartache."  Kenworthy was five when he realised he was "different" to other boys. He worried about it. With no obvious high-profile gay role models, he would mimic the views of friends, as well as his older brother, in the hope of "appearing normal". He would go to extreme lengths to hide his "big, dark secret". "It played a pretty debilitating role on my mental health because I had this fear and dread that there was something wrong with me," he says. "When I was on ski trips with overnights, I would make sure I was the last person in the room to fall asleep because I was scared I'd talk in my sleep and out myself as gay. "I thought that if people found out then no-one would speak to me again, that I'd be kicked out of my home and would never have a career in skiing. It was super damaging." Kenworthy's anxiety only grew during his teen years, when team-mates would casually use homophobic language, describing the weather or judging a course they didn't like as "gay". "It didn't help that everything to do with sponsors and contracts is based around image," he adds. "With no-one else in my sport 'out', I got it into my head that no-one would want to be associated with the 'gay skier' so everything would be taken away from me."