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Outside Magazine January 2004

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Gate Crasher (Cont.)

IN NOVEMBER 1997, in the first run of his first World Cup race, a giant slalom at Park City, Utah, Miller finished in 22nd place. This was considered an amazing result for a 20-year-old American skier, but especially for a rookie who'd been given the unenviable starting placement of 69th. Only the top 30 first-run finishers qualify for the second run, and at the time, the Americans usually watched that from the bottom of the hill.

"It was like, 'Oh, my God, he's qualified!' " Miller recalls, rolling his eyes as he mimics the reaction of his coaches and teammates that day. "They were all, 'Just, like, go slow this run. You'll get World Cup points no matter what. Take it easy.'

Midway through the 2002 Olympic downhill, Miller wound up sliding on his hip at 60 miles an hour toward certain disaster. At the last possible moment, he somoehow found his feet, sprang around the next gate, and finished the race to clinch a silver medal.

"I was like, 'You guys gotta fuckin' chill out.' I didn't want to be 30th. I wanted to be fuckin' top 15 that first race. So I went just as hard, and ended up 11th. And everyone was like, 'Ho-ly shit.' "

It was the best result for the U.S. men in a long time, especially on the team's long-suffering "technical" side, the slalom and giant slalom. The speed guys could sometimes pull off a decent result in downhill or super G, but the entire American squad got skunked at the Nagano Olympics, in 1998, and talented skiers like Jeremy Nobis and Erik Schlopy had fled the whole scene. (Schlopy would return; Nobis now performs in extreme-skiing movies.) Even Tommy Moe, the downhill gold medalist at the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics, had retired at the end of the '98 season, worn out at the grizzled old age of 28.

"I hate to say we weren't a professional team five years ago," says retired downhiller Chad Fleischer, 32, now an OLN commentator, "but we really didn't have a frickin' clue what we were doing. We didn't know how to train for skiing. We lifted the wrong weights, and a lot of other stuff we did was wrong."

The team atmosphere was tense, with the technical squad pitted against the speed specialists in competition for scarce resources, which seemed to materialize only during Olympic years. Like World War I generals, the coaches threw talented but inexperienced young skiers into the trenches of the World Cup, where they'd get machine-gunned by the Austrians, Swiss, and Norwegians. Not surprisingly, a lot of guys burned out on the diet of constant defeats. "It was like, 'That sucked! Now go up and do it again,'" says Fleischer.

Then Miller came along. "And here's this guy," says McNichol, "a long shot, who skis out of the sixties to 11th place. For him it wasn't a big deal. It was, 'Of course I'm gonna do well!'"

Miller didn't see the top 15 for the rest of the 1997Ð98 World Cup season, completing only four out of 18 races, but that first performance showed that a new face had arrived. Miller skied with a hell-bent bravado, and he brought the team much-needed confidence, even if it was embodied by a precocious kid with scant results to back it up.

"Bode's got a deeper conviction about his ability than most people," says Mike Kenney, Miller's uncle and a former pro skier who worked with him during his junior racing days, in the early nineties. "Sometimes, he can seem like the most clueless optimist who ever lived."

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