Misstep Costs Bode Miller a Medal as Austrian Wins Downhill
KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia - Dominant in the training runs, Bode Miller charged out of the start to Sunday's men's downhill and was soon leading by roughly a third of a second.
But Miller, faster in the scary steeps and smoother off the soaring jumps, then did something he vowed to avoid. He unnecessarily chased an extra millisecond, slamming his head and shoulder into a gate panel to cut off a precious few feet of the plunging descent.
It was a miscalculation of time and place.
'He basically took the gate out,' said Sasha Rearick, the United States men's Alpine head coach. 'Sometimes it's faster; in that situation, it's not.'
It was slower for the most paradoxical reasons - at that juncture of the course, the downhill went uphill. With his momentum impeded by contact with the gate, Miller slowed into the incline of a big jump known as the Bear's Brow.
The record-setting gold medal performance Miller was chasing vanished over the crest. By the time his skis regained contact with the snow, Miller was far behind. He finished eighth.
Matthias Mayer, the 23-year-old son of an Olympic medalist, went on to win the race, the first Austrian to claim an Olympic downhill gold medal in a dozen years. The unheralded Mayer, who has never finished higher than fifth in a World Cup downhill, was the surprise winner, something he readily acknowledged.
'This is unbelievable,' Mayer said afterward as his countrymen cheered and serenaded him near the finish line. 'I thought maybe in a few years I could dream of this sort of achievement. It came sooner.'
Mayer's winning time of 2 minutes 6.23 seconds on the treacherous racecourse at the Rosa Khutor Alpine Resort here was 0.06 of a second better than Christof Innerhofer of Italy. Kjetil Jansrud of Norway earned the bronze medal, 0.10 behind Innerhofer.
Aksel Lund Svindal, the prerace co-favorite with Miller, also faltered, finishing fourth.
Mayer's victory may signal a budding resurrection of the vaunted Austrian Alpine team, which did not win a medal at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. Mayer hails from the same region of southern Austria as Fritz Strobl, the downhill champion at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games. Mayer's father, Helmut, was the silver medalist in the super-G at the 1988 Calgary Olympics.
'I am young but I have been around ski racing a long time,' said Mayer, who may be the most surprising Olympic downhill winner since Jean-Luc Crétier of France in 1998 in Nagano. 'I know how much this means to me, my family and my country. It is for your legacy.'
Miller was trying to add a signature victory to his notable ski racing résumé and he was also at the precipice of history. Had he won, at 36 years old, he would have become the oldest gold medalist in Alpine history. If he had won any medal, his six career Olympic medals would have become the second most by a male Alpine skier, trailing only Kjetil Andre Aamodt of Norway.
And Sunday unquestionably appeared to be Miller's best chance to finally claim the celebrated downhill in his fifth Olympics. No one had attacked the 2.2-mile-long, perilous and challenging racecourse here as Miller had, defying the icy, bone-jarring high speed turns with a veteran's experience and the gifted touch for the snow he has always exhibited.
But Miller skied with at least one disadvantage on Sunday. Though the forecast was for a sunny day, clouds remained as the race started, which cast a flat light on the slick snow and made visibility more difficult than it had been in the training runs.
Miller, not usually one to make excuses, said the poorer visibility made it harder for him to attack.
'I ski on the edge and I need to see every bump or variation in the snow,' he said. 'It was a little thing, but ski racing is all about the little things.'
But it was two classic Miller traits - fearless ambition and an inability to leave well enough alone - that ultimately became his undoing.
As Rearick said: 'Today, we didn't want to make a mistake.'
Miller's skis and tactics in training were obviously faster than anyone else's. A principal goal on Sunday was not to waver too much from a plan that had been successful all week.
As he had in previous days, Miller dashed through the stirring and pitched start to vault into the lead. After flying off the Russian Trampoline jump, Miller entered a section of linked turns in moderate terrain still looking like an unstoppable force. Then came the risky opportunity Miller could not ignore.
'Bode tried pinching that left-footed turn too close and ended up putting his head through the panel,' said Miller's teammate Travis Ganong, who had the race of his life and finished fifth.
Miller, typically, did not call that strategy a mistake. But in the timed intervals, he went from 0.31 of a second ahead of the field to 0.02 behind Mayer. As the tactical error continued to slow him, he then fell 0.51 back. His quest for gold was essentially over at that moment.
'Bode wanted it; he wanted it too much,' Rearick said, adding that Miller usually focuses on the process of racing not the result.
Rearick added: 'Today, we let a gold medal result get in our way. His skiing wasn't as crisp and clean from top to bottom as he can be.'
Afterward, Miller was still ruminating about other factors - softer snow, the dim light - but he was willing to recognize what he had lost.
'I would have loved to win,' said the racer who for years insisted that results were meaningless compared with the purity of an effort. 'It's a premiere event.'
Just after he crossed the finish line on Sunday, Miller gazed at the scoreboard and seemed perplexed that his name was not at the top. Alone, he bent backward, almost sitting on the tails of his skis in contemplation for a few seconds.
'I like to make a judgment of myself - make a little sense of what happened before others do that for me,' Miller, who will race four more times at the Sochi Olympics, said. 'So I took that time right there.'
Asked the summation of his thoughts after he stood and quickly removed his skis, he answered: 'This is going to be a tough one to swallow.'
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