Last night, I was sitting next to my sister-in-law watching Bode Miller race down a monstrous hill, slaloming left and right, tiptoeing against the track, when I said, “I hate Bode Miller.” “Why?” she asked. Ah, she’s 21-years-old, too young to remember what happened in Turin, too young to understand. “He slapped the Olympics – and America – in the face.” “How?” she asked. I thought about it. And then it hit me. I had no idea, couldn’t remember a thing. He didn’t drive drunk. He didn’t guarantee a medal he couldn’t win… No, I remembered that I was supposed to hate Bode but had no idea why.
“Brassy Bode Miller captures downhill bronze” reads the headline from the Detroit Free Press this morning. “All these years later, Miller complicated as ever” says the AP wire. It seems as though the media’s memory is better than mine. They remember his great offense to the American public.
A short history lesson: Miller won two Silvers in Salt Lake City in 2002. When the time came to repeat his great triumphs in 2006, he had already been hyped to no end. Nike endorsed him, running “Join Bode” campaigns. He wrote an autobiography, came out with video games, and started sharing his chiseled physique with the world in numerous magazine photo shoots.
A month before the Olympics in 2006, Miller was riding a little too high in a Bob Costas interview and proudly spoke of drunken skiing and his ambivalence toward winning the gold. He talked about the party scenes at the Games and his own selfishness.
“Whether somebody wants me to get five gold medals or whatever it is, I sort of feel like they are all other people’s concerns and issues, not really mine. … I don’t really care what everybody else says,” he said.
So when the Olympics came and Miller bombed – and boy did he bomb, the public did not take kindly to his apathy. They called him the biggest bust in Olympic history. He was overhyped, rude, and not fit to represent the country. He was unruly, obnoxious…someone who would wear tuxedo t-shirts to black tie affairs.
The truth of the matter is that I have used this space to Wag my Finger at athletes who do not try. But Bode is different. Four years later, I don’t hate Bode. I don’t even believe that he didn’t care about winning. I believe he said that as an act to deal with the hype. He was young and in the spotlight and, as a result, his antics were immature, a (hilarious) defense mechanism to deal with it all. At the end of the day, he’s nothing but a super talented frat boy who’s 100% harmless (except when he skis drunk).
I think I would have predicted he was a Megadeath fan
Moreover, Bode does not compete in a team sport. He may represent the USA but letting down teammates, in my book, is a worse offense than claiming you don’t care about the public’s projection of your grandeur. We’re talking about skiing! In a country that is wholly uninterested in sports without a ball or tire, no less! If Bode were passing a baton to the guy in front of him, I think I may hate him and question his patriotism. That’s bringing down others. That is selfish. As it stands, it’s hard to get angry at a guy like Bode the same way it was hard to get angry at Agassi when he was, y’know, hopped on Crystal Meth during tennis matches. Is he the world’s most competitive athlete? Perhaps not. But Bode is among the best at what he does, and he goes out of his way to have fun while doing it. He may make a living off skiing, but he does it for sport.
Bode hasn’t even changed all that much. He still jokes with the media. “You don’t want to go the Tonya Harding route of winning medals,” Miller said. “If you wanted just strictly to win medals, you could go through a whole long start list of racers and just go to their house in the offseason — break a leg here, pull out a shoulder socket there — and you’d probably have a whole bunch of medals.” He’s always been candid. And it’s never been a hateful candor.
So while the media hates him with his long, spontaneous diatribes to relatively innocuous questions and while they consider him a goldless train wreck, he has proven his critics wrong, losing the Gold by the smallest margin in the sport’s history. He’s a rockstar. He’s fun, he’s exciting, and, most importantly, the kid can ski. Bode put up. And has absolutely no reason to shut up.
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