What the hell, he just pulled that off with all the distraction and people yelling, with all the stress, on a single try? How is that even possible, don't speedrunners do thousands of runs to get a win like this? Was it a real run?

And Colbert was speaking and distracting him during some of the most important part of the run and cut off before even really showing his win. What a shame.

He also did it at GDQ. Which really speaks to how good Mitch is.

But once you are at this level, it is the other details that requires grinding:

The thing that sets the run from TFA apart from this run is the hammer bro manipulation that easily fails AND the luck of having good hammer bro movement (6% chance) after the manipulation is done.

Getting those two things on top of good execution is what requires thousands of tries for these top players.

In many cases, there are "marathon safe" methods that are slower but much easier to get on first try and/or recover from on failure. (The "marathon" refers to live speedrunning marathon events like Games Done Quick.) Presumably, he used this.

In addition to how good Mitch is, he's also one of the nicest people around. I recommend his twitch if you wanna watch him speedrun, these days he's grinding SMB 3 10% with a crazy hammer bros. manipulation.