SKI FREE OR DIE

Bode Miller's life was once as free as his style on the slopes. But friends and family fear he's lost his balance.

Flags wave and cars line up and Nickelback blares in the streets. Thousands of fans in parkas and face paint push toward the mountain. Some cling to beer bottles, stumbling through the brown snow with red faces and redder eyes. A few fall and draw laughter, then get back up and fall again. Above, a prop plane buzzes and dives and swerves, mimicking the inebriated revelers below. It is not even 11 a.m. in Kitzbuehel, Austria, but this is the Hahnenkamm, the Super Bowl of skiing.

High up the hill, the racers launch out of a chute, swaying and diving and skidding to within inches of a wall. One of the early finishers says the piste is so eyeball-rattling he could hardly see. Another admits he was scared. No skier goes the entire course without a wobble. The local hero, Fritz Strobl, falls during the final split, scraping down the hill on his back. And then, with accented glee, the PA announcer calls the name of the next daredevil: "Bodeee Milllllleerrrrr!"

He is, from the chute, a vision in controlled chaos. His legs bend and dance rhythmically, but his torso jitters oddly, as if he were falling down stairs. His flailing arms look like streamers. He stays up, not content to manage the course like the others did, but rather slashing it into white ribbons. He winds up fourth and smiles broadly.

Then he slides over to the media. Nonchalantly, he says he's thinking of skipping a World Cup event for the first time in nearly four years but doesn't say why. He admits his left knee is bothering him, but hey, that's nothing new. As he starts to ski away, a reporter asks if he's still having fun. Bode turns, smiles sweetly and says, "I always have fun."
He has to, right? After all, it's in the title of his new book: Go Fast, Be Good, Have Fun. He's certainly been living up to most of that pledge, hauling ass in a sponsor-provided Audi, tying one on after races, waving off hordes of beautiful women in favor of his stunning new girlfriend, Karen Sherris, showing up to team meetings if and when he feels like it, crashing in his RV with the buddy who does all the driving and cooking, mouthing off to 60 Minutes about skiing "wasted" and calling his bosses "rich, cocky, wicked conceited, super-right-wing Republicans" in Newsweek.

Now the 28-year-old is blowing off a race to play golf in Dubai with his little brother. He'll resurface in time for the Olympics, where every camera will find him and every fan will watch and the dollars will pad his wallet so as to render painless even the nastiest fall from grace. What could be more fun than that?

But while it may seem impossible to imagine amid the beer-soaked din of the World Cup circuit, Bode's sense of fun was formed in the near-silence of Easton, N.H., a town so small it had no McDonald's and no zip code. Bode didn't need fast cars or fast women or even fast skis back then. He didn't really need anything. That was the beauty of how he was raised, in the woods near Franconia, without plumbing or electricity or Air Jordans. Fun came from freedom.

Then Bode traded the blessings of his youth for fame and fortune, and some part of his upbringing drowned in glory and greed. Now, as he criticizes everyone from Barry Bonds to George W. Bush, friends and family wonder if he's left too much of himself behind.

THE MILLER residence has no rules. Walk in with Timbs or ski boots or bare feet. No need to knock or announce yourself. There are no locks on the doors. No boundaries. Bode's parents, Woody and Jo, built their cabin in the woods to "escape
civilization." Bode spent his days wandering through the trees and jumping in the stream, tracking moose and collecting all kinds of funky-smelling nature in the forest. He wasn't only home-schooled until fourth grade, he was encouraged to tune out people who supposedly knew better. "I'm somewhat of a question-authority person," says Woody.

That kind of attitude cost Bode his high school diploma, after he refused a writing assignment from one teacher and responded to another's request to ditch his sandals at the prom by saying, "You've gotta be f-ing kidding me." But Bode didn't sweat the loss. Nor did he worry too much when school administrators found him stealing beer. Bode never lost his freedom to party, hang out, run his mouth-and ski.

He skied the way he lived, unaffected by trepidation, tradition or other opinions, picking the straightest line down the mountain even when the world's most fearless skiers wouldn't dare. When coaches clucked and swore, Bode just tucked and roared. When he came into a turn too fast, he was able to correct himself before he started to swerve. Skiers call it feathering, and Bode did it flawlessly. He started to use shorter, hourglass-shaped skis that were designed to help him shift on the fly. Just as in real life, his ability to get away with anything made him that much more adored. While others survived death-defying twists and turns, he embraced them, exploited them. Last year, with his butt stuck out and his arms waving as if in distress, Bode became the first American to win the World Cup overall title since 1983 by doing
basically whatever he pleased. Now, that was fun.

Eventually, Madison Avenue got clued in. So did NBC. Everybody wanted a piece. Bode said yes, and yes, and yes again. Why not? What could go wrong, as long as he got to ski? "It was, 'Hey Bode, here's some money,'" says his uncle and mentor, Mike Kenney. "Who's gonna turn it down? He's not going to burn a pile of cash in the backyard, like I'd suggest. But money is a weight. You think your troubles are gone, but they're worse."

Suddenly the home-schooled hippie had a swoosh on his chest, a script for a commercial under his nose and cameras pointing at him from every direction. He sounded like a Franconian when he ripped wealth and rules and bureaucracy, even as he became a million-dollar baby. He said he didn't want to be famous, but he said it on national TV. He threatened to drop out of the Olympics, but his bio is timed for Torino and his handlers refused The Magazine's interview
requests because "he's holding out for covers." Nike came up with a slogan celebrating his iconoclasm: "Join Bode." Perfect, because Bode has been split in two.

By the end of December, his family found it increasingly hard to reach him. But there he was, in Maxim, hot-tubbing with a voluptuous blonde and jumping into a stream to cure his hangover. "It bothers me," Woody says. "It's not celebrating. It's self-medicating." To Dad, these days Bode seems drunk on something other than life, definitely something other than skiing. "My biggest fear," Woody says, "is that he will change. I want him to have the ability to enjoy the moment and not need anything extravagant. I think he's going in the direction of needing more." And giving less.

Bode says success is a false idol, but a glimpse of his crestfallen face as he watched his 2002 gold turn to silver shows he really does want Olympic glory. Otherwise, why would he skip a World Cup race but come back for Torino? "On the hill, he's great," says teammate Bryon Friedman. "Off the hill, he's got one foot in the door and one foot out, and he's not sure where he wants to be."

Kenney too frets about the changes he sees in his nephew. "He's not really taking things seriously enough," he says in late December. "He doesn't train with the kind of regularity he needs to. And he has the propensity to indulge in the after-hours life. That approach is not good."

He admits they've lost the "closeness" they used to have. "Bode could dominate the sport in ways no one has," Kenney says. "But I see him over the crest and heading south. I don't think he has control over his life."

IN ANOTHER house, just a few steps up the hill from where Woody lives, a 22-year-old man putts on a plastic green. It's Chelone, Bode's only brother. He has Olympic hopes of his own-he's as stunningly poised on a snowboard as Bode is on skis-but he wrecked his motorcycle in October and needed emergency surgery to reduce the swelling in his brain. He spent six days in a drug-induced coma, two weeks in the hospital and a few more days in rehab. Stitches along the length of his head are reminders of where the surgeons cracked open his skull.

When asked about his brother, Chelone looks down at the putter, then out the window, then down again. He doesn't want to say anything rude because he doesn't want anyone to "get bummed out." But he wants to help, to bring
his brother back from wherever he's gone. "He doesn't seem like he's all there," he says. "He doesn't know what he wants. If you talk about retiring and doing what you want, why aren't you doing it?"

Chelone admits he and Bode have a lot in common. He too had problems with authority. He once punched Woody in the nose and threatened him with a kitchen knife. Chelone's school had to call the police once to calm him down. (He took off, and they never caught him.) Maybe it was the lack of structure growing up, made worse when Woody left the family for Nashville to escape his unhappy marriage. But Chelone settled down, stopped drinking and got a serious girlfriend. He loosed his anger on hunting and snowboarding trips. "I got a lot of things out of my system," he says. "I'm lucky I didn't hurt anyone."

Bode, although six years older than Chelone, didn't have that kind of time for reflection. He went from a Maine ski academy to the national team to the Olympics. "When he left," says Chelone, "he got out of the lifestyle that was here. He's always gotta be here or there for an interview or training. He's getting pulled from all sides. Inside, he knows he's not who he'd like to be."

Ask Chelone how many times his brother has called in the two months since he awoke from his coma, and he answers: twice.

ON JAN. 6, Woody sent an e-mail to Bode with the subject line "Your mysterious infection." He wrote, "I've read that you've said you are definitely having a problem with 'motivation'. Not motivation to win or get glory, but motivation to discover and achieve your personal best in any given situation. Without motivation, winning or losing is empty."
Bode wrote back, telling his dad to relax, that everything was fine. It wasn't. Bode hadn't been skiing nearly as well as he did in 2005. And that knee, which he'd shredded in a spill five years ago, was flaring up.

When the 60 Minutes interview aired, two days later, Woody reached his boiling point. Normally so soft-spoken that he speaks more in a rasp than a voice, Bode's dad demanded something be done. Kenney flew to Switzerland to talk his nephew into a new perspective, or back into an old one. But each day continued to bring more aggravation.
Bode has wrestled free in little ways, by ignoring a boot check or showing up late for bib assignments or, yes, bragging to the media about his lifestyle. But that can't bring the freedom of Franconia any closer, or push the pressures of Torino any further away. "The Olympics are going to be a hassle," says Jake Serino, Bode's close friend, driver and live-in cook. "Except the skiing. But he's not really happy about that anymore. He'd rather just lie in bed."

This is a ski addict who didn't miss a race in three-plus World Cup seasons? "I think he'll ski through the rest of the World Cup," Woody says in mid-January. "Then I think he'll look for something else to do." Kenney agrees. "He was ready to quit," he says. "He didn't care. He was limping to the Olympics. He felt used, overextended, driven by sponsors. But hey, that's pro sports."

True enough. Bode began his book by tearing into the Olympic oath, but he's just like the Games themselves: too amateur to be professional, too professional to be amateur. And like the Olympics, Bode pretends to be one as he acts like the other. "It's either convenient," says Friedman, "or hypocritical."

In Switzerland, Kenney got Bode's attention. "I told him he's gotta let his pride go," says Mike. "He likes competing. But is he going to do that until he dies, or come up for air and enjoy life a little bit?" Kenney was more than a little surprised when Bode didn't argue.

A few days later, the phone rang back in Franconia. Chelone picked up. It was for him.

THE U.S. Ski Team arrives in Kitzbuehel on a Monday, and skiers congregate every night at 7 for a meeting. Bode rarely shows. The rest of the skiers resolve not to talk publicly about him, although they go ahead anyway. Ted Ligety: "He never says anything agreeable." Daron Rahlves: "If you go by results, I'd have all the covers right now." Coach Phil McNichol: "You have to keep yourself calibrated to work with him. I have to not give in to his ability to get under my armor." Steve Nyman: "He's selfish."

But Bode is, in fact, a little different in Austria. He skips an important sponsor's press conference to be a forerunner in a competition he's not even racing in. He goes the entire week leading up to the race without saying a word to the media. He doesn't make any appearances at the famous Londoner pub. Instead, he walks slowly past it, on his way to bed after picking up dinner at McDonald's.

On the first race day, Bode's cousin, Chance, stands near the gondola hawking Bode's favorite Go Fast
energy drink. He's also got some Bode hats and shirts for sale. Soon after, Bode comes blazing out of the starting chute with legs almost parallel to the ground and arms aflutter. He wheels in and out of turns & and then he misses a gate. DQ. He disappears off the mountain, takes off his skis and comes charging by Chance on his way back to the RV. He curses as he passes. "He was fired up," Chance says, a little surprised.

The next day's downhill brings the furious fourth-place run, a smile and even a high-five or two with teammates. Three days after that, Bode boards a plane for Dubai, where Chelone awaits. The media think, There he goes again, but Woody couldn't be happier. He's "amazed" to learn of the phone call to his brother. Kenney thinks the worst may be over. Chelone feels the same: "Hopefully, he'll figure out there's more to life than skiing."

And so it goes with Bode, forever hurtling forward at breakneck speed, heeding every impulse and instinct, careening to the edge of his limits and then back the other way, just in time. He strains stubbornly against the mountain, but maybe this time he'll shift and let it win. While he decides, he hangs there, caught between his push and nature's pull.

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