Miller, Vonn reaffirm talent with World Cup titles

Lindsey Vonn secured the World Cup overall title on Friday by finishing 11th in the slalom. AP

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March gets noisy around now, here in the States. Tickets to the Big Dance are punched daily, brackets are busted, NFL free agents are signing, and veterans are being released or given new life. (Good luck David Carr, and if Eli Manning goes down, I don't want to be you even for one minute). In Florida and Arizona, the regulars are playing deeper into every exhibition game as Opening Day draws near.

Meanwhile, on a slushy mountainside overlooking the Italian ski town of Bormio (where, trust me, you can get a killer Margherita pizza at this little place on the stronewalled main street), two U.S. skiers did a remarkable thing: Bode Miller (you remember him) and Lindsey Vonn (her too, in a different way) clinched the World Cup overall titles -- the first time since 1983 that skiers from United States have swept the titles in both genders. (Back then it was Phil Mahre and Tamara McKinney).

The overall title is emblematic of the best skier on the world. It is given to the racer who accumulates the most points across the sport's five disciplines over the course of a five-month season that begins on an Austrian glacier before Halloween and ends with the rotating World Cup Finals in mid-March. It is nearly impossible to win the overall title without achieving a high degree of success in at least four of the five events, from the terrifying, high-speed downhill to the technical (and faster than you think) slalom.

Cutting to the chase: Vonn and Miller stand atop the alpine world today because they are the best in the world. Not best as in simply their final point-tallies in the World Cup standings (the ultimate arbiter), but best in terms of the ability, as measured on a more ephemeral plane. That's the simple explanation. The best man -- and woman -- won. (Asterisk time. * There it is. Miller also benefited from the absence of defending overall champion Aksel Lund Svindal of Norway, who appeared headed for another brilliant season -- he won three globes in 2007 -- when he was injured in a crash on Nov. 27 on the Birds of Prey Downhill in Beaver Creek, Colorado. Svindal, who suffered deep lacerations when a downhill ski pierced his groin and abdominal areas, had been leading the overall, but missed the rest of the season.)

In a very real sense, Vonn and Miller are precisely where they belong. But -- and this can't be stressed strongly enough -- such a weighty prophecy is not an easy thing to fulfill.

Vonn was first introduced to mainstream sports journalists at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City when, at only 17, she finished sixth in the combined event. She stood in the interview mixed zone that afternoon, giddy with the novelty of it all. To the ski world she was very much a known commodity already, having won a junior world title three years earlier, and she looked the part, with a strong, athletic build. But her demeanor was every bit "teenage girl," right down to the smiley-face dotted "i's" on her skis. (Can't remember if it was on Lindsey or ''Kildow,'' her maiden name. Probably both). Three years later she began winning World Cup races and arrived at the 2005 World Alpine Championships in Bormio with the potential to win as many as three gold medals -- in the speed races of downhill, Super-G and the downhill-slalom combined event.

She was not ready. Two days before the downhill, I sat outside a restaurant for an interview with Kildow for a potential piece in Sports Illustrated if she won the downhill that weekend. Clearly feeling the pressure (and also partly unnerved by a fight with her father, Alan, over Lindsey's relationship with former racer Thomas Vonn, who is now her husband), Kildow several times fought back tears in the interview. There are rare times when a journalist genuinely feels badly for an interview subject. This was one of those times.

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