Men's Journal

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

McKay had a special zest for harassing Liko, who was something of a lost soul, and quick to anger. They’d clashed before, which was why Liko told people he felt the need to keep a gun in his car. By the time their last run-in was over, Liko had shot McKay to death by the roadside. A passing motorist then killed Liko with the officer’s gun. The town is still traumatized.

“I was close with my cousin; I’m close with my whole family,” says Miller, growing somber and choosing words carefully. “But I didn’t approve of the way that Liko was, the way that he had lived his life.”

Coming at the same time as his split with the team, Liko’s death helped underscore the need for Miller to do whatever he needed to do in order to reclaim his spot at the pinnacle of skiing. “It was a maturing thing for him, seeing the fleetingness of life,” says Kenney. “It makes everyone ask what they stand for. You tend to reflect.”

Over the summer of 2007, Miller began to change. The old Bode liked his summer beer parties and sometimes showed up to training camp a little out of shape. But the new Bode honed himself into razor-sharp fitness. With a new emphasis on strength and agility, he put himself through endless drills to develop the quickness that’s so essential to his seat-of-the-pants style of ski racing. His mobile gym included an e-centric weight-lifting machine by Agaton (it lifts the weights hydraulically, and Bode lowers them, reducing the potential for knee strain). He did many weight exercises on an advanced $10,000 vibration plate that mimics the chatter of an icy ski run.

“He trained harder off snow than he ever had,” says Johno McBride. “When you’re writing the check for hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for it all, you realize, Hey, I’d better know what I’m doing.”
Miller sequestered himself from the media, giving interviews only rarely. And after fighting the ski team on the drinking issue, insisting all the while that alcohol didn’t affect his performance, he decided he would stop drinking after all. He went cold turkey in early August 2007, as he prepared to head to training camp in New Zealand. He didn’t drink on his 30th birthday that October, or at New Year’s, or even to celebrate winning big races like the Wengen downhill in early January. He didn’t drink when he went out in ski town bars with other ski racers. “That was a really good test,’’ he says. “It sucked sometimes.”

But surely it helped his racing, I suggest. “It made no difference at all,” he declares. “It was exactly how I would have predicted it.”

The results suggest otherwise. After a slow start to the 2007 season, Miller won the Bormio downhill in December — and then took five more first places and a handful of seconds, including one at Kitzbühel. He hadn’t performed so reliably in years. “It made a huge difference,” Kenney says.

He looked like a different skier from the guy who had flailed in five events at Turin. Miller’s style had always seemed reckless, all windmilling arms and thrilling recoveries as he tested the laws of physiology and physics. But the old, out-of-control Bode made only rare appearances last year. In the speed events — downhill and super-G — he now seemed solid, sure of his line, and really, really fast. He was on. Even when he skied into the fence at Kitz, it looked almost as if he had meant to do it. He was in fact skiing more carefully, holding back in his downhill training runs so he could get a better feel for the course. He very nearly won the overall downhill title, but the last race was canceled.

GS and slalom were another story. He couldn’t finish a slalom to save his life, and didn’t get anywhere near the podium in GS, where he’d been world champion and a reliable race-winner. “It reflects poorly on me, and it reflects poorly on Head,” he says with characteristic frankness of the sporting goods giant. “No one’s won a race on Head in fucking GS ever, I don’t think.”

Yet Miller didn’t just trash his sponsor and leave it at that. When he decided his GS and slalom skis weren’t up to par, he flew to the Head factory in October 2007 and designed his own boards. He dubbed the new slalom ski “Beefy” and tried to race on it for the first half of the season. Beefy proved all but unskiable, even for Bode, yet it took a few months for that truth to penetrate his stubborn skull. He did not finish three out of the first four slaloms and finished 26th in the fourth. But only after a disastrous race at Adelboden, where he blew out at the sixth gate, did he give up on Beefy.

By midseason Head had gotten the message and delivered better skis; meanwhile Bode had figured out how to deliver better skiing. On Mondays, while other teams were recovering from the weekend’s racing and attendant celebrations, he would be up on the hill already, training slalom, his greatest weakness.

It paid off. Miller scored a fifth in the Wengen slalom in February, giving the world a glimpse of the Bode Miller who used to rock the gates. In the Super Combined he backed off the speed and made it down enough slalom courses to win that title outright, scoring the points necessary for him to lock up the overall. “He’s definitely become a smarter skier over the last few years,” says the Olympic gold medalist Ted Ligety, a friend of Bode’s. “He used to just go balls-out in any section of the course.”

This past November, in the first slalom of the 2008–’09 season, at Levi, Finland, Miller stunned the field by finishing second — his first slalom podium in years — which must give pause to his competitors. “It’s just gonna be scary this year,” says Ligety. “He’ll most likely blow everybody away. It’s his to lose.”

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“What if I quit right now?” Bode wants to know. “What if I get injured this next week and don’t race again? Because if I get injured this next season, I’ll probably stop. Why not? I’ve got a lot else to do.”

We’re in the living room of his farmhouse on Streeter Pond Road, and the interview has gotten heated. There are clothes strewn around, two sets of golf clubs, a compound hunting bow, and a high-powered BB gun with a laser scope, good for pinging deer at long range. The surroundings call his bluff for him: This is not the home of a man close to settling down to raise organic beets.

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