AP
Bode Miller crosses the finish line knowing his dream of Olympic gold in the downhill is lost.
KRASNAYA POLYANA – Ski racing glory slipped from Bode Miller’s grasp on Sunday as he finished a disappointing eighth in the 2014 Olympic men’s downhill race, won by 23-year-old Matthias Mayer of Austria.
Entering the event in peak form, Miller made a series of small mistakes on the challenging Rosa Khutor course. Immediately after crossing the finish line with no chance at a medal, Miller paused for solitary minute to look back up the mountain and, he later explained, to judge his performance before submitting himself to the opinions of others.
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“Today was a really critical, important day for that because I have a lot of races ahead of me,” said Miller, who is expected to compete in four more Alpine events at the Sochi Games. “I would have loved to win obviously. It’s the premiere event and something I’ve thought about quite a bit.”
Miller is 36, racing in his fifth and probably last Olympics. He has five Olympic medals, including a bronze from the 2010 downhill. After out-skiing all of his rivals in training runs in the week leading up to the race, it had seemed like the stars had aligned for him at Sochi.
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Charlie Riedel/AP
A series of small mistakes costs veteran American skier Bode Miller in the Olympic downhill.
Mayer, the 23-year-old son of an Olympic medalist skier, completed the course in 2 minutes, 6.23 seconds. His victory came as a huge relief to an Austrian men’s team that was shut out of the medals at the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver.
“We can now put criticism aside and just be happy and look forward,” said Mayer, who hails from the same region of Austria as Franz Klammer, the 1976 Olympic downhill champion who is commonly regarded as the greatest downhiller of all time.
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Silver and bronze went to Christof Innerhofer of Italy and Kjetil Jansrud of Norway, who were 0.06 and 0.10 seconds off Mayer’s pace, respectively – margins that correspond to only 65 inches and 109 inches on a course that was 2.17 miles long.
The top American in the race was Travis Ganong, a 23-year-old Californian who finished fifth in what was his first-ever Olympic race. Two other Americans, Steven Nyman and Marco Sullivan, were 27th and 30th.
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AP
Mattias Mayer of Austria skies his way to the gold medal at the Sochi Winter Games on Sunday.
Mayer’s father, Helmut Mayer, was the bronze medalist in the super-G event at the 1988 Calgary Games. The younger Mayer has never won a downhill race on skiing’s premiere annual circuit, the FIS World Cup, but he has shown promise and he won one of the three training runs on the Olympic slope earlier in the week.
Miller won the other two training runs, and had been particularly strong on the top third of the course, where the turns weave through a glacier-carved bowl at the top of the Caucasus Mountains before plunging down into a beech forest where four intimidating jumps awaited.
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In the race run, Miller briefly lost his footing on the upper section, but appeared to lose much more speed about two-thirds of the way into the course. At one point, the aggressive line he chose shot him into the panel of one of the breakaway gates that mark the course; Miller flattened the gate to the ground, and may have lost some velocity in the process said his coach, though Miller disagreed.
“Hitting gates doesn’t make any difference,” he said. “I continued to build pressure. It was just that middle part of the course… It’s just that the course had slowed down. It’s one of the big challenges of ski racing, is sometimes it’s not in your hands.”
But Miller conceded he’d made mistakes on the course and that his skiing suffered from the cloud cover that affected visibility, obscuring some of the finer details of the surface he was skiing on. The head coach of the U.S. men’s team, Sasha Rearick, said Miller wasn’t as “clean and crisp top to bottom as he can be.”
“The one thing I do know is that we’re going to take that animosity or that fire we have in us and we’re going to bring it towards the super-G, the super combined and the GS,” Rearick said. “Go back to what we do best. Focus on our effort. Focus on work. Focus on good skiing. And we’ve got the nerves out of the way and I’m sure we’re going to throw down now.”
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