Bode Miller

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BODE MILLER

Home Mountain	Cannon Mountain, NH
Age	28
Height	6 ft 2 in
Weight	210 lbs.
Ski	Atomic
Other Sponsors	USA Ski Team
Discipline	Racing

Samuel Bode Miller (born October 12 1977 in Franconia, New Hampshire to Jo Kenney and Woody Miller) (middle name pronounced Bo-dee, in IPA Template:IPA) is an American alpine skier. He grew up in Easton, a small community in the heart of New Hampshire's ski region. His family, including older sister Kyla, younger sister Genesis and younger brother Chelone, lived on 500 acres (2 km²) of land in the forest, where his parents celebrated the Solstices, in a log cabin without electricity or indoor plumbing. He was homeschooled until the third grade, but after his parents divorced, he applied for and got a scholarship to the Carrabassett Valley Academy, a training ground for skiers in Maine, where he took up tennis and soccer. Jo's parents owned and started the Tamarack tennis camp.

Miller first gained widespread recognition when he won two silver medals at the 2002 Winter Olympics in the Giant Slalom and Combined events, though he had been known to skiing fans since he burst onto the World Cup scene as an 18-year-old in 1996, becoming the youngest skier ever to make the U.S. Ski Team. While still a teenager, Miller pioneered the use of hourglass-shaped (or "parabolic") skis, shaving two seconds off his time in his first run while utilizing them. Miller is also known for his reckless style, often risking crashes to increase his chances of winning a given race; in his book, Go Fast, Be Good, Have Fun, Miller stated that his goal as a skier was not to win medals, but rather to ski "as fast as the natural universe will allow." Recently, Miller has also become famous for his reclusive (but outspoken) personality, and for his sundry attention-getting statements.

On the program 60 Minutes, in January 2006, Miller described the act of skiing "wasted" and compared it to lawlessly driving while intoxicated. [1] He issued an apology for these comments less than a week after they aired. [2] During an interview with Rolling Stone later the same month, he claimed Lance Armstrong, Barry Bonds, and unspecified other athletes "knowingly" cheated by using performance enhancing drugs. [3]

In the 2002/2003 season Miller sought the overall FIS World Cup title but fell just short, finishing second to Austrian Stephan Eberharter. In the 2003/2004 season he won FIS World Cup titles in two disciplines: Giant Slalom and Combined but placed 4th in the competition for the overall title. In the 2004/2005 season Miller won his first overall FIS World Cup title, defeating Austrians Benjamin Raich and Hermann Maier. Miller also won the 2005 FIS World Cup title in Super-G and was second in both Downhill and Giant Slalom.

In the 2004/2005 season, Miller also made history by winning at least one race in each of the four standard disciplines: Slalom, Giant Slalom, Super-G, and Downhill: by winning a slalom in Sestriere, Italy, on December 13, 2004, he shared this record with Marc Girardelli of Luxembourg, who had been the first man to accomplish this feat in 1989. The victory was his sixth of the season after only ten races.

Miller has historically fared well at the FIS World Ski Championships. At the 2003 Ski Championships in St. Moritz, Switzerland, he won three medals: gold in Giant Slalom and combined, and silver in Super-G. At the 2005 FIS World Ski Championships in Bormio, Italy he won two gold medals: in Super-G and in Downhill.

Bode's autobiography, Bode: Go Fast, Be Good, Have Fun, co-written with his friend Jack McEnany, was published by Villard/Random House on October 18, 2005. Bode also became the first alpine skier to endorse a videogame since Tommy Moe when Bode Miller Alpine Skiing released for Playstation 2 and Windows on February 6, 2006. Miller is the subject of a recent biography, Flying Downhill, which looks at the people and the place he comes from, and where exactly each fits within his complicated psychology.

At the 2006 US National Championships, Miller won the Downhill and Giant Slalom titles.

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2006 Winter Olympic Games

Despite the hype surrounding Miller in the weeks prior to the 2006 Winter Olympics, every one of Miller's five medal bids in the Turin Games fell short: he finished a disappointing 5th in the Downhill, was disqualified -- while in first place at the time -- during the second leg of the Combined event, received a DNF (Did Not Finish) in the Super G, tied for 6th in the Giant Slalom, and claimed another DNF after missing a gate in the Slalom. While his Olympic Alpine Skiing finishes were respectable by historical American standards, it disappointed expectations and was widely perceived as a personal and team failure.

Miller has been the subject of severe criticism in the wake of his Turin performance. Bob Costas' prime-time editorial, after an unapologetic Miller interview with Tom Brokaw, featured the uncharacteristically savage conclusion that Miller might finally get what he wanted: to be unceremoniously forgotten. Miller was subsequently vilified in the American and international media; editorials focused mostly on his attitude, accusing him of simply not caring about the Olympics or about his performance. Many perceived his "whatever" attitude a violation of the "Olympic Spirit," and in contrast to Miller's big-money deals with dedication-oriented sponsors like Nike which espouses to "Just Do It."

Miller's fame was partly spawned by his 2002 Olympic Slalom performance where, as a relatively unknown athlete, he hiked back up the course to finish after missing a gate -- a rare, mostly symbolic act of dedication in a sport where hundredths of second separate Gold from Bronze. After his disappointing 2006 Olympic performance, though, Miller summarized his experience by stating that his "quality of life is the priority," and repeated what had become his mantra throughout the Olympics: "I'm just trying to ski in a way that's exciting for me." In an interview shortly after his last race, he said that it had "been an awesome two weeks," and that he "got to party and socialize at an Olympic level."

Some of the responsibility for the excessive publicity rests with Nike's relentless advertising campaign, in which they urged consumers to "Join Bode" (prompting Washington Post sportswriter Sally Jenkins to ask, "Where? At the bar?" in response to his well-publicized nights on the town in Turin). [4] Some have argued that the blame for Bode's publicity crash-and-burn rests with himself, his PR people, and his manager, all of whom made Miller available for a veritable media blitz in the months leading up to the Olympics.

Prior to the 2006 Games, Miller told Tim Layden of Sports Illustrated, "[The Olympic hype] is going to be a tough thing for me to manage. My actions are not always consistent. I'm super-mellow and laid back, but I'm always thinking and running 100,000 scenarios through my head. Sometimes I'm disciplined, but I like to be a total slacker, too. I party hard, but I train hard. People are going to try and figure me out and figure out my motivations, and it's going to be a circus." Always a bit of a loose cannon, Miller frequently responds to questions from the press with, as Layden put it, "sermons that are often delivered without regard to consequences" (witness his 60 Minutes and Rolling Stone interviews), and the inner conflict in recent years between his sudden fame and wealth (his contract with Atomic Skis reportedly pays him a salary of seven figures) and his rustic, no-frills upbringing has only seemed to heighten his sense of recklessness. But whatever his motivations, Miller seems to adhere strongly to his home state's motto, "Live Free or Die," and his 2006 Winter Olympic performance fits perfectly with it: he may not have won, but he certainly did things his way.

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