By Michael Ames, former publisher of The Street, is a staff writer for the Idaho Mountain Express.
It's been two weeks since the Olympic torch was extinguished. In our frenetic media cycle, Torino is old news. Still, it's worth reflecting on exactly how and why the media deemed ski racer Bode Miller such a colossal flop.
In ski towns like ours, Bode Miller is not hated. In high-altitude villages where people live to ski and ski to live, the defending World Cup overall champion didn't make many new enemies after his 0-for-5 Olympic performance. It was too late to hate him; too many had already been awed by the best American racer in a generation.
Not so, of course, for the chattering classes of the mainstream media. Willfully forgoing any semblance of objectivity, sportswriters joined to form a collective wagging finger and harmonized about Miller's worthlessness. Leading up to the games, hype gave way to clear demands: Bode Miller, regardless of recent achievements, owed America gold medals and anything less would be interpreted as abject failure.
This is the role of many in the media today. That's what they do: build people up high enough, so that when the time comes to kick the pedestal out from under their feet, or boots, the freefall will be all the more spectacular.
How else can you explain the brazen glee that so many sportswriters took when writing their Bode Miller epitaphs last week?
Here is a random sampling:
"Miller arrived in (Torino) sullen and defensive, and blew his chance in the downhill when he lost time on the bottom of the course, probably as a result of his lack of fitness," wrote Sally Jenkins, a Washington Post columnist. (Journalism 101 tip: When in doubt of accuracy, simply insert the word "probably.")
"What Bode accomplished was making himself one of the more colossal losers in recent sports history," said Tony Kornheiser, also of the Post.
Those who follow skiing know what these blowhards don't: The Olympics are just one stop in an otherwise grueling four-year stretch of World Cup starts. It was not shocking that Miller didn't finish three races in Italy. In fact, it was par for the course. In the past few seasons, he has become notorious for skiing so furiously, a finish is a triumph in itself. Even during his 2005 World Cup overall triumph, a slalom course completion was far from everyday. This is what makes him inspiring to watch. He skis as hard as he can, results be damned. (This season, he is currently ranked third in World Cup overall standings, or, in media-speak, "a disappointing third.")
What was shocking during the Torino tabloid-Olympics, was how the American media took a poster-boy for individualism and athletic participation and had an absolute field day destroying his reputation.
Detractors will say he brought it on himself. "He skied drunk!" they will clamor.
The fact is, Miller's original statements on drinking were taken further out of context than Howard Dean's scream. The guy got drunk the night after becoming the first American to win the World Cup overall in a quarter century. (Phil Mahre did it in 1983.) Perhaps champagne should be replaced by sparkling cider in World Series winning locker rooms as well.
"He had no will to win!" they will croon. The fact that Miller is an iconoclast who loathes the contemporary media didn't exactly work in his publicity favor. By the time he proudly announced that he got to "socialize on an Olympic level," it was obvious he was thumbing his nose at a media he does not respect.
Prior to the games, Miller said "TV and media right now ... are brutally mind-numbing and tedious." He may not have realized it at the time, but Bode Miller's grossest failure was allowing himself to be caught on film or tape by the very people he distrusts. Doing so simply added fuel to the fire of the villagers' torches when they came, pitchforks bared, to impale him on their cruel, insipid stake.
