Men's Journal

Team of One: Miller, on his farm in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire. Photo credit: Christopher McLallen

It was also pretty much the wrong way to handle someone like Bode Miller, who grew up in mostly unfettered freedom, thanks to factors including his parents’ divorce, the family’s relative poverty, and an ingrained headstrong temperament that did not like being told what to do but instead insisted on him finding his own answers.

As he described it to me when we first met, five years ago, “It’s like one of those things where, if you’re gonna go out and mow the lawn, and then your brother or sister says, ‘Hey, go out and mow the fucking lawn.’ And then you’re like, ‘Fuck you, I’m not gonna mow the lawn. I’m gonna wait now.’ ”

So, sorry, U.S. Ski Team: Bode Miller was not going to mow your lawn. In May 2007, after a relatively lackluster post-Olympic season, he was summoned to a meeting in Park City, Utah, with head alpine coach Phil McNichol, alpine director Jesse Hunt, and CEO of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association Bill Marolt, who offered him two choices, each typed out on a piece of paper. The first option was to continue following the so-called Bode Rules, with one new twist: Now he’d have to pay the team, which was running short on cash, to cover his travel expenses. Option two was to leave the team altogether.

“It was like a four-year-old wrote those things,” Miller scoffs now. “But it was almost a relief. There was no other option. It was either retire or do it right. And I’d always kinda wanted to do it right.”

—-

As a kid Bode Miller was actually not a very good ski racer. “Sort of a ragged little scrapper” is how his uncle Mike describes him. He didn’t blip onto the national radar until the relatively late age of 16, and his unorthodox style drove coaches mad. He skied fast, but he leaned so far back on the tails of his skis that he was nearly out of control. Coaches tried to get him to fix his flaws and adopt a more conventional style, but he resisted.

It didn’t matter to him that his results were wildly uneven. Even when he started racing World Cups, it seemed as though he would either win the race or (more often) go into the nets. He had his own ideas, and he wasn’t about to let a little failure dissuade him. When it worked, his style let him ski faster than just about anyone. It also made him great at recoveries, because he was so close to crashing all the time. The important thing, to him, was that it was his way of skiing, a style he had developed as a little kid, trying to keep up with his aunts and collegiate-skier uncles on the slopes of Cannon Mountain.

That’s what most journalists didn’t grasp: The thing that made him different from other athletes was not his hippie parents, or the fact that their home had an outhouse, but his organic, almost artistic approach to skiing. His uncanny feel for the snow and his preternatural sense of balance allow him to be creative on the course, skiing lines that most other racers would never dare. “He uses sport as a method of expression,” says Kenney.

Coaches and institutions, in Miller’s view, only got in the way, hijacking his goals with their own. Now he had a golden opportunity. He could fire all his coaches, or at least the ones he didn’t like. Within 48 hours of the May 2007 meeting in Park City, Miller and his agent Lowell Taub began laying the groundwork for Team Bode, his Team of One. First they recruited a team of supercoaches. One of the first calls went to John “Johno” McBride, 43, the ski team’s former head super-G and downhill coach. McBride had already retired from the team once but had been persuaded to return as Bode’s main coach for the 2006-’07 season.

Miller persuaded two other coaches to come onboard: his uncle Mike Kenney, who had been a pro racer and sometime U.S. Ski Team coach, and Forest Carey, another U.S. coach and a former schoolmate of Miller’s at Carrabassett Valley Academy. He would also have his own ski technicians, personal assistant, and chef — who would have to be fed, housed, and flown around the world on Miller’s dime. His original RV has grown into a fleet of three custom motor homes, with one tricked out as a full-scale training gym, another serving as his living quarters, and a third for his coaches and staff — all of whom, of course, have to be paid. The price of freedom: just under $1 million.

Even for Bode Miller — whose agent estimates his total income to be in the “mid-seven figures” — that’s a lot of money. But separating from the ski team also had considerable financial advantages. “It opened up new platforms for us,” says Taub. “We no longer had to worry about competing with U.S. Ski Team sponsors,” who dictated what kind of jacket Miller could wear, among other things. This year, he added a handful of new sponsors, including ultra-luxe Hublot watches and Madhouse Munchies, organic Vermont potato chips.

The real upside was the ability for Miller to create his own perfect little Bode Bubble. “The thing that was great about coaching Bode was you actually don’t coach,” says Kenney. “Your real job is creating an environment around him that values and appreciates athleticism. Not necessarily just through skiing, but through tennis, squash, soccer, hockey — we played tons of hockey last year. They’re as important to keeping him even and sharp and enjoying the sport, enjoying the process of being involved in athletics, as skiing.”

Of course with freedom came responsibility. Miller was now the boss, with employees to manage and paychecks to sign. “Managing my own team was a whole different challenge,” he says. He knew that if he got hurt, Team Bode (which he has officially dubbed Team America) would screech to a halt. “With the ski team there was always a safety net,” he says. Leaving the ski team also meant he no longer had anyone else to blame. Team America would live or die based on how he performed.

Miller had another reason to get serious, one that he doesn’t like to talk about much. He had just lost someone close to him in a freakish north country tangle of blood and retribution. Just days after he decided to split from the U.S. Ski Team, his 24-year-old cousin Liko Kenney (Mike Kenney’s nephew) was pulled over by a Franconia policeman named Bruce McKay on the road leading to the family farm. Franconia is a small town, and McKay was known to be hard on the local kids, including Bode, to whom he’d written at least one $500 speeding ticket. McKay also was the officer visiting the Millers the first time I interviewed Bode, in 2003.

Print this article