You Don't Know Bode

Jan. 23, 2006 issue - Bode Miller, the most gifted American skier in decades, talks the same way he races: fast, loose and seemingly out of control. He has a smirking disrespect for the media, a stance he'll repeat until your recorder runs out of tape. As far as he's concerned, the only stupid questions from reporters are the ones that end in question marks. But he'll answer anything—anything—and the moment he opens his mouth, he's an ink-spiller's fantasy. He's funny, he's incisive, he's foulmouthed and combative, and he's stubbornly, refreshingly honest. Sometimes too honest. Miller caused a furor on Jan. 8 when he went on CBS's "60 Minutes" and implied that he once skied a World Cup event while drunk—or at least extremely hung over—which is nearly as stupid a thing to say as it is to do. His U.S. Ski Team coaches are accustomed to cleaning up his messes, but the "60 Minutes" interview pushed an already tense relationship to the brink. Last week in Switzerland, the site of the World Cup's latest tour stop, men's coach Phil McNichol and U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association chief executive Bill Marolt made it clear that they're mad as hell and they're going to take it only for a little bit longer.

One more month, to be precise. Compared with the Summer Olympics, the Winter Games tend to be quieter affairs in midsize towns, and the upcoming Olympics in Torino, Italy, which start on Feb. 10, seemed destined to unfold in the looming shadow of the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing. Then Bode opened his big mouth and gave this snowy carnival something it dearly needs: serious heat. Late last week he got the requisite public penance out of the way. At a press conference, the self-styled rebel fell in line and offered an apology (of sorts) for "the way I made those comments" and for causing "a lot of confusion and pain." Now he can get back down to business. "Bode fully plans on skiing for the red, white and blue in Torino," his agent Lowell Taub told NEWSWEEK. "He has an uncanny ability to flip a switch, put blinders up and come to his sport with uncommon focus and intensity, and that's exactly what I expect to see next month."

That's a relief for racing fans, since Miller spent much of 2005 wondering aloud if he might just sit out the Olympics entirely. He claimed to be weary of his own fame and suspicious of an Olympic movement that he thinks has become too money-driven and medal-obsessed. Few people believed that he would actually stay home, but during a NEWSWEEK interview last November, he insisted that he was genuinely torn. "If it wasn't such a cluster-f—- for me to pull out now," he said, "I'd definitely consider it." Miller, 28, was in New York to promote his new autobiography, "Bode: Go Fast, Be Good, Have Fun," which he co-wrote with an old pal, and he agreed to sit down with NEWSWEEK at a hotel bar in Times Square. For the record, the only thing he had to drink was a bottle of Snapple.

"The reasons I'm going [to Torino] are really impure," he began, "and that definitely bothers me." He has endorsement deals galore, including a massive advertising campaign with Nike, and he also feels obliged to repay those who've helped his career. "The U.S. skiing folks have really done a lot for me. They put up with me, and I push those f---ers hard. I am a constant pain in their a-- about making them do all the s--t I think they should be doing anyway. They've had to adapt to me just like I've adapted to them, and I think they've done exceptionally well. Look, a lot of the people involved with the U.S. Ski Team—the people that I'm representing—are unbelievable a--holes. Rich, cocky, wicked conceited, super-right-wing Republicans. But because of my morals, my principles, I can't judge them for that. The things they've done for me warrant respect, and I'm trying to pay them back."

With friends like these, just imagine what he'd say about his enemies.

Of course, there's another reason for Miller to show up on the piste next month in Italy: he lives to ski. Despite an unorthodox technique that confounds his coaches and singes the eyes of racing purists, Miller is blisteringly fast—that is, when he can stay on his feet. "It's like his upper body is detached from his lower body," says U.S. teammate Lindsey Kildow, a rising star on the women's side. "His upper body is just crazy. It's all over the map. But what his lower body does is incredible. He's always going straight down the fall line. It's by far the straightest line I've ever seen." Miller finished enough races in the 2004-05 World Cup season to win the overall title, becoming the first American champion in 22 years. (The overall combines all four alpine disciplines: slalom, giant slalom, super G and downhill. Miller is the only American ever to win a Cup event in each of them.) Racing fans are drooling over a long-awaited Olympic showdown between Miller and Austrian titan Hermann Maier, the four-time World Cup champion and two-time Olympic gold medalist. It's a confrontation between the two most gifted all-round skiers of their generation, and it has shades of Rocky Balboa versus Ivan Drago, minus the ugly cold-war jingoism. Miller is the scrappy, backwater, regular dude; Maier is precise, ferocious and—having survived a horrific crash in competition at the 1998 Nagano Olympic Games as well as a motorcycle wreck in 2001 that nearly tore off his leg—seemingly indestructible. His nickname is the Herminator.

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