BEAVER CREEK, Colo. - As convoluted as his discourses can become at times, Bode Miller's explanation as to why he left the US Ski Team this year is as plainly flinty and homegrown as life in his native New Hampshire mountains.
"You never want to be somewhere you're not wanted," said the 30-year-old Miller prior to today's start of the four-day World Cup event in Beaver Creek, Colo., the only Cup stop in the United States this season. If he is bitter, it doesn't show - no rebellious fire in his words nor any ring of intended revenge on the team he represented for a decade. And so Team America, a.k.a. Team Bode, rolls into the season in a 30-foot motor home that had become a symbol of the simmering tensions between Miller and his coaches.
Since emerging on the World Cup scene in 1996, Miller has shown himself not only to be a true star, but also a star-crossed rebel who refused to play by any rules but his own, insisting he doesn't care what people think.
And at this point, in a country where ski racing commands only a marginal following -- in Europe and Japan he commands megastar attention -- Miller is known more for his well-reported negatives than his stunning achievements.
His win-or-crash style may be exciting, but often frustrates coaches and spectators; entering the 2006 Olympic Games as a favorite to win as many as five medals, Miller went 0 for 5 amid reports that he was enjoying the wild party scene in Turin to excess.
But the most audacious example of Miller's bad-boy behavior came during an interview on a January broadcast of "60 Minutes" - just before those Olympics - when he told correspondent Bob Simon that not only had he raced a slalom in "wasted" condition, but that he had no particular intentions to stop the practice.
And speaking of a downhill race in Bormio, Italy, the year before where he lost a ski at 80 miles per hour and finished on one ski, he told Simon, "I kind of had an idea that people would think it was pretty funny and that the coaches would probably be bummed out and, you know, mad like they always are."
He was right.
In pursuit of history
So inflammatory is his devil-may-care ski style and his public persona that the other side of Miller sometimes gets forgotten. With two World Cup wins this season, Miller will tie Phil Mahre's US record of 27. Surpassing Mahre would make a strong case for Miller being the best male US ski racer in history.Miller won two silver medals at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games, and he captured two golds and a silver at the 2003 World Championships in St. Moritz, Switzerland. In 2005, he became the first American male to win the World Cup overall championship since Mahre did it 22 years before.
Last season he won his second World Cup super-G title.
After the turbulent 2006-07 season, the US Team, stinging from donor criticism, clamped down on Miller, introducing rules only thinly disguised as team regulations, but aimed particularly at Miller's use of his motor home as a kind of clubhouse on the race circuit.
The lodging rule that forced him out of the motor home he had used for four years and into team hotels throughout the winter became the tipping point that forced Miller to make good on an oft-voiced threat to leave the team.
Given his financial success - mostly from prize money and product endorsements that have reaped him millions - the US Team dropped its backing of Miller, which, he says, coupled with overly restrictive rules made leaving the team a natural.
"It wasn't really my choice to [leave] although there were elements of control, I suppose," Miller said. "But I had the choice to pay for myself and be a part of the team, under the restrictive rules -- no motor home and no external dryland coach, no assistance with a gym on the road, no assistance with nutrition or anything -- or go on my own.
"I would have loved it if they would have allowed me to do all the stuff I needed to do to run the best program I could and still be part of the team, but that wasn't one of the options. For me, it's a loss in one area and a gain in another, and that's probably true for the team."
So far this young season, Team America is off to a slow start. Last Saturday in a downhill race at Lake Louise, Miller could manage only a 20th (a race he had won in the past), while US Team member Marco Sullivan reached the podium with a second place. The next day, Miller finished 25th in a super-G race, and his world ranking fell from fourth to 12th.
Miller has spent most of his time training for the technical gate racing, and entered the speed races this season with just four days training. His best finish has been a fifth in a giant slalom race Oct. 28 in Solden, Austria. On Nov. 10, recovering from a back strain, he hit a gate in a slalom in Reiteralm, Austria, and finished 26th.
Miller is entered in all four races scheduled for Beaver Creek, beginning with today's combined super-G and ending with Sunday's downhill. His decision to enter every race, something he has done in other years, raises questions in critics' minds whether this dilutes his training time on any single discipline and tends to drain his strength over the course of the season.
"It's just my preference to ski and race in all of them," he said.
Close-knit team
This year, as "CEO" of his own team -- the term used jokingly by US coach John McBride, whom he hired -- Miller's team, headquartered in the 30-foot motor home, is a collection of old friends met through years of skiing.McBride, the former downhill coach for the US team, is joined by Forest Carey, a former US Ski Team member and coach of the Middlebury Alpine team, whom Bode met in high school at Carrabassett Valley Academy; Mike Kenney, his uncle; and lifelong friend Jake Serino, his driver and cook.
Miller said his entourage represents "all the best people I've worked with over the last 15 years."
As McBride cuts back his coaching duties in December to be with his wife, Sunni, who is expecting a child, former Swiss women's technical coach, Fritz Zueger will join the team. Zueger was suggested to Miller by Dr. Martin Duppenthaler, CEO of Go Fast Sports, a European company that is a major sponsor of Team America.
With a total staff of nine, Miller is expected to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund the season, but has reportedly raised nearly $1 million in funding to compete in as many as 40 men's World Cup races in 20 cities, most of them European and all expensive resorts.
Although there is some precedent for his leaving the US Ski Team -- slalom specialist Kristina Koznick from Minnesota funded her campaign for $150,000 yearly -- few skiers have the money.
The most famous case is that of Marc Girardelli who, at the behest of his father and personal coach, Helmut, bolted from the Austrian team in the 1980s and skied for Luxembourg. Girardelli, whose personal trainer was Miller's new coach, Zueger, still holds the record for overall World Cup titles with five.
If Miller's leaving is a net loss for the team, whose skiers do not have the benefit of training with him, US coaches aren't saying.
"There were elements of being part of the team that were great." says Miller. "But the way things worked out I was really left with no other options. My goal now is to run the best program I possibly can."
Tony Chamberlain can be reached at sloops@aol.com
