Bode Miller - Bode: Go Fast, Be Good, Have Fun

Contents

To Jo and Woody,
for giving me love and freedom
and leaving the rest to me

BODE

Prologue

The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.

T hats the Olympic Oath, and I believe the last line pertains only to games, because being conquered literally is to be avoided at all costs, even by exceedingly good sports. This I think we can all agree on. The rest of the oath sounds noble enough, but I ask myself: Who but an American Green Party politician or a Chicago Cubs fan could go through life doing his best and never winning? Thats got to suck.

I cant say I thought much about the oath during the opening ceremonies at the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002. I never memorized it, of course; Id never even learned the Pledge of Allegiance in school. Life, the Olympics, and competition in general are exactly as the oath describes, but if youre squishy on the subject of winning, well... dont expect much.

I was in Salt Lake City to have fun and to win, which is my attitude in every race I run. Not for the medals, but for the moment. If I win a medal it adds to the fun, but not by much. That said, if I dont win anything at all, I still have fun. Otherwise it would have been a long, hard road.

See it from my perspective: the U.S. Ski Team right out of high school, a pretty hot first giglots of international travel, and I never had to wear a pin that says ASK ME ABOUT OUR HOT APPLE PIE. I was planning this when other kids were dreaming of being astronauts. I never had a grand strategy using the byzantine FIS point system or the Jedi Mind Trick. Im just happy to have gotten here, happy to go out to rip and win.

Most of the media, and all of the ski media, are generous to me for the most part. But not entirely. Do a Google search on Bode Miller and outhouse, and see how many hits you get: a lot. I dont want to know the number, so dont tell me.

I keep my distance from the quizzlers when I can. Not that I dont like them, because I often do, but its extra work, which I always avoid. Besides, newspapers depress me, television is stupefying, and radio is full of bad music and people who talk more than they think. I have a monitor at home to watch DVDs, and satellite radio that plays nothing but what I want. We got no stinking cable, no damn broadband connection either. We be info-low-tech here, by careful design. It keeps me sane.

In hotels, I watch C-SPAN if I can get it. And even there, it seems like every time I turn on Book TV I get some old wheezer bragging about clever generals and the horrible beauty of war. It always raises this question: Is history more reliable than the news? I say probably not.

Dont get me wrong. The press work as hard as anyone I know without calluses on their hands. Theyre notoriously early risers. Im up at six-thirty every morning, no matter what went on the night before, and as I make coffee, I usually notice movement out the frosty window of the RVI have to scrape it with a thumbnail to see outsideand in the barren gray light theres always some sorry bastard with a notebook in his hand, lightly stamping his feet to keep warm while waiting for me to do what, I do not know.

Do they know what they want? A story, of course. Reporters will tell you that they want information that no other reporter has, and thats why they call it news. I cant imagine that theres anything that I care to share with the media that I havent already discussed ad nauseam. I like the technical discussions we have after a race. I wish theyd publish more of thatthe hill, the gear, and the conditions.

Pop culture, especially sports television, is getting dangerously close to The Running Man. Professional sports today are too much about the players and not enough about the game. Reporters are often more interested in what I did the night before a race than in the race itself. Aprs press conferences often remind me of when I was a kid and the ski patrol chased me. The media give me that same eerie sense of being pointlessly pursued by someone who can never really catch me.

Im interesting for all the wrong reasons. I dont choke, and I dont distract easily. I do fall, as does everyone, and ski off-course, and I even missed a start at the Nationals last year because I didnt hear my wake-up call. The media love that stuff. Big wins, big crashes, big fuckups. The Bode Show is what the coaches used to call it. Not that reporters dont appreciate a well-run race, because they do. But Ive had difficulty conveying one small, simple truth: when I ski, I enjoy myself. I never come away feeling like a fifth woulda-coulda-shoulda. I do my best and then, after a beer and big-ass steak, I sleep like a baby.

Not that I dont consider what went wrong. There was a downhill race in Vail in 2001 that I fretted hours over afterward. I was having this magic run on the long boards and loving it. Victory flitted above me as I zoomed faster and faster, deciding whether she should land or not. Maybe my shoulders werent big enough, or I hadnt washed my hair, or she just couldnt catch me. In the midst of this stupid fucking reverie, with next to no gates to go, I hooked a tip. And that was that. Victory flew off and sat on somebody elses head. Share the love.

I want to win all the races I run, but I really wanted that downhill. My mind was ready; my feet were not. It was fall 2004 in Lake Louise before I actually won a downhill or a super-G. Patience.

I fall a lot less now. Flachau, Austria, in 2004, for instance, two races in a row. The next season in Beaver Creek, Colorado, I won the first two races and DNFd on the next two. One second Im beating the shit out of the course, the next Im pointless and timeless. Life goes by fast on its own, never mind on two slippery slats at seventy-five miles per hour.

Falling doesnt bother me; I dont slip into a trough of despair over race results. Not that losing, falling, or screwing up in any way makes me happy. I think deeply about where things ate shit, and consider how I might have done them differently. But its not a bother. In fact, I enjoy the introspective side of racing. Thats why I do it. That, and the inhuman speed.

I admit Ive considered that if Id won the Flachau races, Id have also won the 2004 World Cup overall. The thought has wandered through my mind more than once. There were a couple other close ones that season, too. I didnt finish eleven out of forty races, but so what? Think about it, but dont ruminate.

I dont dwell on losses. Thats dopey. If I dont worry about the next race, why would I worry about the last one? The World Cup overall, like any superlative, means something, but what? You cant really reduce ski racing to a number; there are too many variables for that.

I speak for myself and no one else. Im laid-back about medals and awards, but the U.S. Ski Team is definitely not. Its front office is interested in medals, and you can understand why. In contests where the winners and losers are separated by hundredths of a second, theres virtually never a dispute over who won. Medals are a nice, solid, objective standard that they can measure their business model by. Napoleon invented medals; he found you could pay people with them instead of money. It still works.