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Outside Magazine January 2004
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Gate Crasher
Bode Miller has everything you could want in a World Cup ski racer. He's fast, fearless, and frequently out of control. He can drink like a sailor and swear like a snowboarder, and he's got the talent to take it all from those grim Austrian cyborgs. Most amazing, he's American. Can we make this guy a hero already?

By Bill Gifford

Bode Miller in Austria
Bode Miller in Sölden, Austria, for the World Cup opener last October (Jake Chessum)
COMING INTO THE FIRST TURN, it's clear that Bode Miller is carrying way too much speed. He's on a tight, treacherous course, with a lot of chatter and no room for error. Blow this corner and there's a thousand-foot tumble to the sheep pastures below.

Miller does the natural thing: He hits the gas and cranks the wheel hard to the left, throwing his rented Subaru into a four-wheel power slide around a muddy hairpin curve.

It's a sunny August afternoon, and the 26-year-old Miller is blitzing down from
World Cup Fever
Get the goods on the televising of this year's World Cup ski racing on Outdoor Life Network
the Treble Cone ski area, on New Zealand's South Island, where he and the rest of the men's U.S. Ski Team have spent the morning training in the snows of austral winter. Treble Cone is one of New Zealand's largest and most developed ski areas, but it can be reached only by a snaky mountain road that turns from asphalt into dirt before switchbacking the last five miles up to the base area. Riding down with Miller after practice, I understand now why none of his teammates wanted to come along. As the Subaru slides toward the edge, it's starting to look seriously like Miller's 2003-04 ski season—which many believe could erase any doubt that he's the world's best alpine racer—might end before it starts. But just then the wheels catch, pulling the car to the inside. Miller countersteers expertly, straightening out, and guns it down the next pitch.

"These bumps suck," he mutters.

Maybe he should try organized rally driving, I suggest through clenched teeth.

Whooooosh. He pulls another power slide, this time to the right. "Naw," Miller says. "If I were a rally driver, you'd be shitting your pants."

And with that he rails the last turn, a gravelly sweeper on the flats, shoots past a carload of startled teammates, and hits the pavement flying.




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Philadelphia-based correspondent BILL GIFFORD wrote about the Tour de Faso bike race in July 2002.
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