The Sports Illustrated Olympic Daily is published in Salt Lake City and available in event venues and on newsstands for 16 straight days during the 2002 Winter Games. Here are some sights and scenes from today’s edition.

Born to Ski Wild

With a medal in today's slalom, Bode Miller would become the most decorated American skier at a single Games. Ask him if he cares

A child of vintage '60s parents, Miller has grown up to become the world's fastest slalom skier. Jeffrey Lowe

By Tim Layden

This morning Bode Miller will stand at the top of a steep, icy slalom run at the Deer Valley Resort, facing down a minefield of more than 60 plastic gates, each an opportunity to turn, to slide, to crash. Each an opportunity to fail at the Olympic Games. At the bottom of the hill a temporary stadium will rock with emotional support for Miller, who will be gunning for his third medal of the Games, which would make him the first U.S. skier to win that many at a single Olympics. Flags will wave, his name will be chanted -- Bo-dee! Bo-dee! -- and a rich new world will await him at the bottom.

Except Miller would rather not have any of these trappings. For Bode, it's not about the medals. Not the silvers he won in the Alpine combined and the giant slalom. It's not about the celebration that will unfold if he rips through one of his singularly scorching slaloms and makes the best gate-running skiers in the world look like plodding amateurs. It is about the skiing. "Even though these are the Olympics, it's about competing hard, not giving up -- it's about pure racing," he said last week. "And that's hard to remember sometimes because it's easy to get motivated by other things."

Go back to Wednesday, Feb. 13, to the men's Alpine combined competition at Snowbasin, a powder haven shadowed by steel-gray peaks 40 miles north of Salt Lake City. The combined is an odd calculation of one downhill and two slalom runs, contested at these Games in a single day for the first time. A cynic would suggest that the combined is too long and too strange to be interesting or significant. A purist would argue that the event rewards the most versatile skier in the world.

Miller is already the world's fastest slalom skier. His task in the combined was obvious enough: Ski sensibly yet fast enough in the downhill so that he could enter the slalom within striking range of skiers like Kjetil Andre Aamodt and Lasse Kjus of Norway.

He failed to either ski sensibly or stay close. After running raggedly for much of the downhill, Miller skied clean through the tilted, lower section of the course called Offtrack Canyon, holding his skis against the sidehill while turning right. Transitioning to turn left through Slingshot, Miller lost his edges at 60 miles per hour and bounced on his left hip. "It was a crash. My skis were not touching the ground, and my ass was," Miller would say later.

Miller fought to yank his skis back beneath him and his body was flung toward the outside of the course, where coaches were gathered. His knees were bent impossibly underneath him until, at the last possible millisecond, Miller snapped the long, downhill skis to the left, briefly uncoiled his body, somehow cleared the next gate and sailed off Buffalo Jump onto the wall of the 74% slope that leads into the finish. The crowd watching on a giant television screen at the bottom of the hill gasped as if they had seen an automobile accident. Miller's reaction was similar.

But for a couple of mistakes, Miller would have two gold medals around his neck instead of a pair of silvers. Carl Yarbrough

"Once I recovered, the entire way to the finish I was thinking, Ho-lee s---," said Miller a day after the race. "I mean, I do stuff like that more than most people, recoveries and all that, but this one. Then I saw the tape. How did I not tear my meniscus? Or my ACL? How did I not fly into the coaches, headfirst, at 55 or 60 miles an hour? And they would have had zero time to react."

The run left him 2.44 seconds behind Aamodt, who led after the downhill. It was far too much, against too solid an opponent, for Miller to dream of recovering, even on two slalom runs. Miller was a little disappointed and a little angry and very sore and frightened. People die in downhill crashes. He went to the U.S. team's training trailer at Snowbasin and rode a stationary bike in his long underwear to dissipate the lactic acid in his legs and to clear the shock from his nervous system.

Two hours later he attacked the first slalom run but made a terrible mistake at the top of the steep section and another at the bottom. He climbed over the bodies of a bunch of downhillers in the standings, ascending to fifth place. But he gained nothing on Aamodt.

The final slalom run, contested in fading, late-afternoon light on a rutted course, was one of the most memorable in Olympic history. Miller, skiing 11th in the 27-man field, ripped down the slope in 49.73 seconds, more than a second faster than other slalom specialists, such as Benjamin Raich (50.91) and Rainer Schoenfelder (51.31), both from Austria. Aamodt, with a huge cushion -- "I figured 2.44 seconds would be enough," he said later, laughing at his near miscalculation -- won the gold medal over Miller by .28 of a second, losing the final slalom run by more than two seconds while winning his record sixth Olympic Alpine medal. (He now has seven.)

Miller's silver-medal-winning run immediately took a place alongside Franz Klammer's wild gold medal downhill in 1976 and Alberto Tomba's thrashing silver medal slalom in 1994, in which he also skied from the back of the pack. "Bode just dropped the hammer," said Austria's Kilian Albrecht, who finished eighth. "When he does that, anything is possible."

The medal machinery immediately swallowed Miller. After a flower ceremony and a press conference, he was hustled off to the spartan Huntsville, Utah, bed-and-breakfast room he had shared with teammate Casey Puckett. Miller packed a small backpack and hoped it would last him four days. He was driven to the medal ceremony in Salt Lake City and then made appearances at USA Houses in Salt Lake and Park City. By the time he wriggled free, Park City clubs and restaurants were closed. He was driven to the Grand Summit Hotel at the Canyons Resort, where he slept for two hours and was then awakened for an appearance on the Today show.

By noon he sat, bleary-eyed and dumbstruck, on a couch at the resort. "This is not the way I would celebrate an Olympic medal if I had a choice," Miller said. "It makes it all feel anticlimactic."

Bode has held court with Jay Leno and others, but he's more comfortable when his skiing is doing the talking. Courtesy of NBC

Yet as he spoke about the final slalom run, Miller perked up. "That second run is what the Olympics are about," he said. "The Olympics are about struggling to compete, struggling to be at your best when it counts. That second run was cool in that way. It was such a challenge. I got beaten down physically in the downhill and scared, too. And there was this big adrenaline rush that just drained me. Then I made mistakes on the first slalom. It was all such a huge challenge, and that second slalom run, it was just great, pure skiing.

"When I think about it," said Miller, "I could probably have won a gold medal if I had skied more cautiously in the downhill and a little more slowly in the first slalom with no mistakes. But it wouldn't have been the same."

Eight days later, on a different mountain, Miller again found the sweet place between ambition and the skier's pure flow when he took the silver behind Austria's sublime Stephan Eberharter in the giant slalom. After running first out of the start in the opening run, Miller was in seventh place, a distant .91 behind Eberharter but only .17 out of second place. He had the fastest second run in the field to pass five skiers and finish second. And at the finish of his run, he sat back on his bindings, exactly as he had five years earlier when he finished well back in his first World Cup race. "I think I've come a long way in five years," he said after the race. And that was as important as the medal they would hang from his neck.

Miller's Olympic attitude is as unusual as the rest of his life. He was raised on 500 acres outside Franconia, N.H., in a home without electricity or indoor plumbing. His parents, Jo and Woody, were vintage '60s parents who voraciously eschewed material trappings. Bode began skiing at two and was homeschooled through the third grade. He skied and lived by feel and fought authority on issues ranging from ski technique to school term papers.

Exhibit A: In his senior year at Carrabassett Valley Academy in Maine, he received a 68 on a senior English term paper and refused to redo it for a passing grade. As a result, he still does not have a high school diploma, despite nearly five years of solid academic work at CVA.

Exhibit B: He has been a member of the U.S. ski team since 1996 and has constantly struggled with coaches' attempts to refine his aggressive style. Even now, as he prospers, his relationship with coaches can best be defined as a truce.

In Salt Lake, Miller has chafed at his living arrangements. He and Puckett shared a room at the Jackson Fork Lodge, nine miles from the Snowbasin race area, which is one the most remote venues at these Olympics. "The coaches are into this isolation thing," Miller said before the combined. "This is the Olympics. I'd like to experience a few things." In his room was a small television set with a rabbit-ear antenna to improve reception. "We got three stations," said Miller. "Two of them were too fuzzy and snowy to watch, and the other one had stock quotes running across the bottom and they talked about Enron all week."

On the day before the combined, Miller trained downhill and then stayed in the finish corral for more than an hour, signing autographs and posing for pictures, largely to avoid going back home.

His satisfaction comes by contrary means. If the Today show can't fully understand his joy, then Cam Shaw-Doran surely can. Shaw-Doran was a snowboarding and skiing buddy of Miller's back in New Hampshire who was also raised in a home with an outhouse and no electricity. In the fall of '97 Shaw-Doran suffered injuries in an automobile accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down.

On the day after the combined, Shaw-Doran called Miller's cell phone, and Miller immediately brightened at hearing his voice. "Dude, what's up?" Miller shouted. They talked for several minutes and agreed to talk again later, as a limo took Miller to the airport for the private-jet flight to Los Angeles.

From there, he would head off to train for four days in Sun Valley, Idaho, and then return to the madness of these Games, which desperately yearn to make him a celebrity when all he wants is to ski fast.