Erratic Miller has slight edge
Well, well, Bode Miller certainly hasn't made it easy on himself in his quest to be the first American since Phil Mahre (1982) to win the overall World Cup title.
Last week, we worked out the math for the remaining eight races of the season and made the obvious conclusion that if he skied only fairly well in those races, Miller would win that coveted title, which rewards all-around ski racing skill -- ranging from speed to technical racing.
But the ground is shifting.
In the early 1980s, Swede Ingemar Stenmark, the winningest technical racer of all time -- 86 World Cup wins -- lost to Mahre, who scored just enough points in downhill and combined to beat Stenmark for the seasonal title.
Going into last week's action in Kransjka Gora, Slovenia, the World Cup had four speed and four technical races remaining, and Miller held a 191-point lead over Austrian Benjamin Raich. Of the eight, two races were slaloms. Despite his early-season win -- which started his World Cup lead -- Miller's slalom has been woeful. He failed to score points in the next eight slalom races, and admits to "having problems" with the discipline.
But since his other disciplines remained strong, especially downhill and super-G, in which he either found the podium or scored highly all season, Miller's slalom problems seemed little more than an annoyance.
But since the World Championships the first two weeks in February in Bormio -- where the Franconia, N.H., native captured two gold medals, downhill and super-G -- the season took an unexpected downturn. Raich is now within 31 points of Miller's lead.
A week after the Bormio races, Miller went into Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, for a pair of downhills, and a chance to put some real distance on Raich, who does not race downhill. Miller placed third in the race Friday, but after leading Saturday's race by a huge margin, he made a dangerous error that dropped him into fourth place and left him thinking about how close he came to crashing.
"It's frustrating," Miller said after the race. "At this point in the season, I expect little mistakes but not these big mistakes. Maybe a 10th of a second here and there but not these full-second mistakes like today. It's not what I expect of myself."
Leading the race after the top two sections, Miller's line became so straight and aggressive that he was forced to catch himself before skiing off course at around 80 miles per hour into deep snow.
"I'm happy with the fourth place," he said after sitting alone for nearly 30 minutes, "but I still can't get past the way I'm skiing, making big mistakes . . . just stupid misjudgments and miscalculations."
Still, the third- and fourth-place finishes allowed him to gain ground on Raich and pad his overall lead to 191 points. But then disaster struck last weekend in Kransjka Gora.
Though Miller announced he had made some technical changes to his boot/ski setup that should have helped his slalom, he skied out of the first run while Raich went on to place third -- and take an 80-point bite out of Miller's lead. In the giant slalom, Miller lost a ski for another DNF and Raich closed to within 31.
"I had a bad weekend," Miller said Sunday. "I didn't score a point, but my confidence is not dented. I still have speed races."
If Miller can outpoint Raich this weekend in Kvitfjell, Norway (who would ever have used the term "if" on a speed weekend showdown between these two?), he still should be set up to hold his own in the four-race season finale next weekend in Lenzerheide, Switzerland.
Even Raich, the ace of an extremely deep Austrian team, concedes that Miller still holds a slight advantage. But the genial 27-year-old raises a warning.
"Bode is good in speed events and he is stronger than me now," Raich told Ski Racing's Nate Vinton after last weekend. "But if you give me a chance, I will catch [him]. You can't think about the big picture while you're skiing. I don't think beyond each race."
Raich speaks with a point.
Because of a lukewarm weekend followed by last week's disaster, Miller is putting more pressure on fewer races. None of the remaining six races is expendable, with the possible exception of the slalom in Switzerland that closes out the season March 13. But with the very real possibility that Raich will win that slalom and that Miller won't finish it -- giving Raich a 100-0 advantage on closing day -- then the pressure is on Miller to build his lead back to more than 100 points before March 13.
Given two downhills, two super-Gs, and a GS before the final slalom, Miller should be on track to win the overall. But many agree with US men's Alpine coach Phil McNichol that some of Miller's erratic skiing this season has injected tension into the World Cup finish.
"Ski racing is a difficult sport and it can go either way pretty rapidly," said McNichol. "Bode has suffered this year in consistency, mainly in slalom, where he suffers from a lack of strategy."
