Bode Miller Is Olympic Hero

I find it amusing that so many fans of Bode Miller today are the same people four years ago who were snickering and deriding him for his individualistic pluck.  It just makes me smile. 

I have always been a Bode Miller fan.  When he was showing some grit and ‘go-my-own-way’ attitude in 2006 I applauded his style.  Jumping in life as everyone else does is easy.  Taking a different path, regardless of the reason, is much harder.  So I have always admired the skill and style of Bode Miller, be in on the slopes or in living life.

Today Jason Gay, the sportswriter I love to read (and he is the only one that fits that description) did a great article on the Olympics.  I did not agree with the tone and  foundation of  the article as it takes a shot at how the Olympics are being promoted, but I love his writing style.  And the fact he started the piece out with Bode Miller.  While I post that portion you can read the whole writing here.

Bode Miller is an Olympic gold-medal hero.

Awkward. Awesomely awkward.

Who didn’t want to see this comeback? Besides NBC, of course, which opted to show Mr. Miller’s historic super combined victory on tape delay, several hours later. That’s cool. As the NFL taught us years ago, nobody wants to watch live sports on a Sunday afternoon.

Still, Mr. Miller persevered—and now takes a restless place in Olympic history. It’s an amusing mantle for a dissident who liked to renounce the five-ring mystique, who appeared to care less if your breakfast Wheaties came with his unshaven, blue-eyed visage. Mr. Miller with a gold medal is like Leonard Cohen with an MTV Video Music Award—a strange, comical pairing that somehow feels all right.

The win at Whistler was fittingly Bode-licious. Mr. Miller dug himself in a seventh-place hole after a subpar downhill run; just making the podium would be a challenge. But in the slalom portion of the super combined, Mr. Miller—forever linked with an aggressive, edge-of sanity-style—fearlessly unleashed himself. Huffing across the finish line, he seized the lead. After Aksel Svindal of Norway skiied off the course and failed to finish, Bode the Raconteur was suddenly the craggy, unlikely face of these Vancouver games.

Bode Miller of the U.S. during the downhill of the men’s super combined event Sunday at the Whistler Creekside venue.

Of course, for the rest of our lives we’ll hear—sonorously—about Mr. Miller’s stubborn, sometimes bewildering path to Olympic glory. How he blew off the U.S. Ski Team in favor of his own unorthodox one-man operation. How he threw away a chance at glory in 2006 in Turin, in favor of a few late-night Peronis.

Like his East Coast homeboy Walt Whitman, Mr. Miller contained multitudes. He was large and contradicted himself. He was a nonconformist who graced magazine covers; a maverick draped in a Nike deal. The media helped fuel the mythology, portraying Mr. Miller as a self-taught mountain boy aloof to the sport’s fundamentals or customs. Part shaman, part Jeff Spicoli, Mr. Miller would insist his skiing greatness was a matter of the moment, a state that couldn’t be defined by hardware like medals.

But now, after years of dominance on the World Cup circuit, he has the only prize that really eluded him. He can deny it, but the rebel finally found his cause. We’re sure Hollywood’s already at work on a Bode Miller screenplay, and Vince Vaughn is moving to Big Bear to train.

Truthfully, the whole Bode-the-insurgent idea was starting to feel overcooked. Age and fatherhood—not to mention a summer spent away from training—appeared to soften the 32-year-old, who grew up in Franconia, N.H. Back on better terms with the U.S. team, he’d already won a silver and bronze in these Games, and seemed to have happily fallen into the role of the wily, creaky veteran: Ed Asner with goggles. At times he could be found chatting amiably with reporters about his 2-year-old daughter’s birthday or how inspired he was by Lindsey Vonn’s performance. He wasn’t about to turn into Ryan Seacrest, but that infamous Bode Smirk had been replaced by a smile.

Thirty years after the upset in Lake Placid, Mr. Miller provided a Miracle of Nice.