Image sequence of ski crash: best design?

For years I have saved this sequence of photos that ran in the
Seattle Times. There’s an interesting tension here
between the direction of reading and the implied direction of
movement of the subject:




The caption reads:

Austria’s Hermann Maier goes airborne, far right, and ultimately
crashes through two safety fences in this sequence taken from
TV footage of his downhill spill at the seventh gate.

So here we have an attempt to reproduce in print the capacity of
the moving image to capture the motion of a figure from right to
left. This sets up a clear battle against the Western reader’s
instinct to read left-to-right.

I assume this never would have been attempted with, say, a
mere sprinter running leftwards. The designer must have
assumed that a human in great peril, moving with tremendous
force, would be powerful enough to break the reader’s eye
movement.

I think it’s clear the designer judged incorrectly;
the reading pattern, left-to-right, predominates no matter the
circumstance. The caption writer, finding himself having to tell
the reader to begin looking at far right, should have warned the
designer that no one would read this correctly on the first try.

I wonder what strategy would have worked best, especially
taking into consideration the sense of movement the designer
wanted to convey. And, more generally, is there any resolution to
the dilemma of communicating right-to-left motion in a medium
that is read left-to-right?