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Outside Magazine January 2004

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Gate Crasher (Cont.)


	Blowing off postrace steam; Miller hits the soccer feild. (Jake Chessum)

AS I STOOD NEXT TO JOHN MCBRIDE later on that foggy day, watching skier after skier negotiate his course, it was clear the racers were struggling. The snow was fast but the light was flat, and I watched Schlopy attack the run, grunting with every turn, taking a couple of gates to the face; at dinner, he'd have a fresh cut over one eye. Then came Rahlves, chattering through a transition and blowing out two gates later and punching the air in frustration. But he tried again and, on his next run, skied the course perfectly.

Finally came Miller, who already seemed to be in form. "I feel great on skis," he'd told me earlier. He'd even poached the Austrians' GS course one morning—they were training on a neighboring slope—much to the annoyance of Hermann Maier, who'd been having a difficult time of it that day. For the past few years, the U.S. coaches have been training the team with or near the Austrians, in Europe and New Zealand and South America, for just this reason: to show the Americans that the "blockheads" (so nicknamed, Rahlves told me, because "they're so straight and square") are human, too, and therefore can be beaten.

McBride's radio crackled to life after Miller blew by. "Night and day," said a coach who was watching the practice run farther downhill and helping evaluate any improvements. Miller was testing a radical new boot, which he designed and which Rossignol built for him, against last year's Nordicas, which served him pretty well. So far, the Nordicas were winning, but a layperson would be hard-pressed to notice. Gunning for every gate, Miller charged past us so fast you could practically hear a sonic boom roll across the valley below.

The microflexion of a ski, the slight tilt of a knee, a few more pounds of pressure on a thin metal edge at precisely the right moment to convert inertia into speed—these are the quantum mechanics of elite ski racing, and they hardly seemed the kind of thing a talented slacker would obsess over. But Miller understood how thin the margins could be, how small details in a boot or skis could mean dramatic results.

"If you're pushing only 89 percent or even 99 percent, that can make you lose four-hundredths of a second," Miller told me after the run. "So it's not really a fluke. There's fluky shit involved—there's wind, there's all kinds of things—but in the end that's part of the equation. That's why it's cool to win by that amount, because I feel like my extra effort made the difference."

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