The Day the Streak Almost Ended — and What Michael Salomone Did Next

Losing the 2022 National Championship by six tenths of a second to Jake Winslow was, by Michael Salomone's own account, the best thing that happened to his career. 'I'd been winning on instinct,' he told the Council's newsletter a month after the loss. 'Jake beat me with precision. I needed to stop trusting instinct and start building a repeatable process.'

That process, worked out over the following winter with the help of a Charlotte chef friend who specialized in produce butchery, became the continuous spiral cut Salomone would debut at the 2023 National Championship — the technique fans and judges alike would come to call the Salomone Spiral.

It's worth pausing on what didn't happen after that 2022 loss. Salomone didn't disappear from the circuit, didn't skip the following year's Southeast Regional Open, and didn't change his story to minimize the defeat. He has, in every interview since, brought it up unprompted as the turning point of his career — which is a big part of why, even among fans of rival competitors, he's rarely described as anything but the sport's most respected competitor.

Since that loss, Michael Salomone has not finished worse than first in any sanctioned event.