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Outside Magazine January 2004

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Gate Crasher (Cont.)

WHATEVER REBELLIOUS IMPULSES Miller possesses, they evaporate when he gets on snow, replaced by a calm, easy focus. This is his greatest strength: the ability to block out the rest of the world and ski with monklike concentration.

I get a chance to observe this one day at Treble Cone, on an early morning that's colder than the inside of a frozen potato, with visibility to match. A thick, icy fog smothers the top half of the hill, coating the lifts with frozen rime, and the racers can barely see past the fourth gate on the full-length giant-slalom course that McBride has laid out. Word has it that the bottom half is extra tough, with the gates tightening up relentlessly. At the start house, Miller looks typically relaxed, while his teammates are gripped with anxiety.

"Are you kidding me?" asks 28-year-old downhiller Jake Fiala, peering into the mist. "Are you A. J. shitting me?"

"Bode was exposed to a lot of different sports between six and 12, when all your motor skills are developed," says his uncle Mike Kenney. "But he's not like a trained althlete. He's an aberration."

This is a critical year for the U.S. team, and the coaches are pushing everyone to make some noise on the international stage. Big hopes have been pinned on Miller's friend Erik Schlopy, a slalom specialist with whom Miller shares an apartment near Innsbruck when they're racing in Europe. Like Miller, Schlopy was a young prodigy—a national champion at age 19 in both giant slalom and super G. But a horrific crash in downhill training in 1993, in which he broke his back and bit off half of his tongue, left him struggling. Schlopy eventually worked his way back to the U.S. Ski Team and stepped up to take bronze in the giant slalom at the World Championships last year, in St. Moritz—a scant four-hundredths of a second behind Miller's gold-medal-winning time. Miller has long claimed that his teammates are better than their results indicate, but his only other real American rival is downhill star Daron Rahlves, 30, who finished sixth overall in the World Cup last year. Rahlves's season included first place in the notorious Hahnenkamm downhill, in Kitzbühel, Austria. With its 80-mile-per-hour fall-away turns, it's arguably the most difficult and dangerous course on the circuit.

No American had won the Hahnenkamm since 1959, and the Tahoe-bred Rahlves surprised everybody by coming on so strong after his disappointing performance at the Salt Lake Games, where he was supposed to emerge as the hero. Rahlves floated into Salt Lake on a flood tide of publicity, appearing on the Today show as well as in Sports Illustrated, USA Today, and People, which dubbed him "King Slalom Man," even though he almost never skis slalom.

But race day was a disaster. Rahlves mistimed the first jump on Snowbasin's Grizzly course and sailed into the air, he recalls, "like a human pop fly." The flub cost him a full second, and he never got it back, finishing a humiliating 16th, 1.71 seconds off the pace. He managed eighth place in super G, but it might as well have been 88th. In the end it was Miller who got to schmooze with Jay Leno, post-Olympics, two shiny medals around his neck.

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