Moving Mountains

The U.S. skier with the best shot at winning gold at Salt Lake City did not make the preseason media guide’s section listing Olympic medal hopefuls, and it was no editing mistake.

It makes only more remarkable what Bode Miller has accomplished since November. With little warning, Miller has gone from mysterious to magnificent and has to be considered one of the favorites in both Olympic technical races--the slalom and giant slalom.

What precipitated this rise was sort of a ski racing harmonic convergence. Miller, 24, began his fourth season in a fog of uncertainty, on the mend from a serious knee injury suffered at last year’s World Championships and on the minds of coaches who wondered if the strong-willed gate racer would ever conform.

The answer came early, over Thanksgiving weekend, when Miller bounded from the 54th start position to finish second in a World Cup slalom at Aspen, Colo.

Since, he has become the most talked about technical skier on the U.S. scene since brothers Phil and Steve Mahre made tracks in the 1980s.

Since firing that slalom salvo in Aspen, Miller has gone overseas and won four World Cup races--three slaloms and one giant slalom. His Dec. 9 GS victory at Val d’Isere, France, marked the first World Cup win in the discipline by an American male since Phil Mahre in 1983.

Miller followed with a slalom victory in Italy on Dec. 10 and another Jan. 6 at Adelboden, Switzerland. In that race, he defeated second-place finisher Ivica Kostelic by an astonishing 1.92 seconds--the skiing equivalent of winning a 100-meter race by 10 yards.

Miller has also posted a second-place finish in GS and third in slalom.

After his second World Cup win, in Italy, Miller said, “Imagine working your entire life and watching all your dreams and all your aspirations come true, all at once.”

God-given ability was never Miller’s problem. He carved up courses for years as a ski protege growing up in New Hampshire, yet arrived to the ski team with his own agenda.

The knock on him up to the opening races this season was that he took too many chances and not enough advice.

“He’s got a little rebel in him, no question about that,” Jesse Hunt, his coach, says. “That has actually worked to his advantage in a lot of ways, but in terms of maturity it has slowed down his process.”

Coaches wanted Miller to hold back a bit on his risk-taking, and Miller resisted. In technical events, a racer needs to negotiate the fine line between speed and control.

“It’s not that I haven’t been trying to make the right decisions,” Miller said after his podium finish in Aspen, “but you can only do what you can do. It’s hard to ease back.”

Miller has obviously discovered the right touch and heads into the Olympics with incredible momentum.

He knows, though, that winning a medal takes more than skill.

“It’s a one-shot deal,” he says. “You have once chance at it and if you can pull it off, you get your rewards. Really, it’s the essence of the sport, but there’s a painful reality when you miss by a hundredth of a second or you hook a tip on the last gate.”