Bode Miller's Flying Circus

"This is going to be a tough thing for me to manage. My actions are not consistent. I'm super-mellow and laid back, but I'm always thinking and running 100,000 scenarios through my head. Sometimes I'm disciplined, but I like to be a total slacker, too. I party hard, but I train hard. People are going to try to figure me out and figure out my motivations, and it's going to be a circus."

-- Bode Miller, June 2005, anticipating the buildup to the Turin Winter Olympics

BODE MILLER and eight months of hype: There's a match made in hell. The 28-year-old Alpine skier is forever the petulant teenager, insisting on answering media queries with sermons that are often delivered without regard to consequences. Few athletes have been more ill-suited to the biennial role of Olympic icon. � His public image as a loose cannon was cast in January, when 60 Minutes broadcast an interview in which Miller said he skied "wasted" and Rolling Stone published a story in which Miller suggested that Barry Bonds and Lance Armstrong had used performance-enhancing drugs. ( Armstrong has repeatedly denied such allegations, and Bonds has denied knowingly using steroids.) Both interviews were conducted during a six-week media blitz in October and November but were held until the Games loomed close, giving the impression that Miller was becoming increasingly reckless and disdainful as the Olympics drew near.

In fact Miller has been skiing faster after a long, mediocre season, and last week he left the spotlight to prepare his mind and his sore body for the Games, joining his brother, Chelone, who nearly died in an October motorcycle accident, for a golf vacation in Dubai.

SPORTS ILLUSTRATED met up with Miller at various points on his eight-month ride, including one stop at his sister's home in New Hampshire in October. After having criticized the international antidoping movement in several interviews that month, incurring the wrath of international ski officials, Miller sat on a coach parrying attempts at spin control by his agent, Lowell Taub. Suddenly Miller threw his hands toward the ceiling, laughed maniacally and shouted, "I want to make all drugs legal! I want to race wasted!"

It was hilarious, and clearly a joke--but you had to be there.

JUNE 8, 2005, FRANCONIA, N.H.

Miller lives in a quaint A-frame off Easton Valley Road, south of the village. Hand-lettered signs nailed to trees alongside the dirt driveway read BEAT IT and SCRAM. "That's our high-tech security system," says Cam Shaw-Doran, one of Miller's two housemates. Inside the house are piles of dirty clothes, a massive stereo, a long row of empty tequila bottles. Outside are dirt bikes, mountain bikes, golf clubs and acres of woodlands and streams.

The 2004-05 World Cup season ended in March, and Miller is home to rest. "I can go jump in the river if I want to," he says. The house is across the street from the Miller family's Tamarack Tennis Camp, which is a mile below the no-plumbing, no-electricity home in which Bode was raised by his hippie parents, Jo and Woody. (Franconia friendships are Bode's deepest: On the World Cup circuit childhood buddy Jake Sereno, 27, drives Miller's RV and cooks his meals, and cousin Chance Stith, 32, will be selling the skier's licensed merchandise--mostly hats and T-shirts--at event sites.)

Miller's time in the woods this spring has been minimal. He went to the world hockey championships in Austria with his girlfriend, Karen Sherris; jetted to Louisville for the Kentucky Derby, where trainer Bob Baffert (a ski buff who named his infant son Bode) let Miller help saddle starter Sort It Out; and chilled in Los Angeles. He has not trained seriously in 10 weeks. "You need to let your body go into full mellow mode to recover from the season," Miller says.