by Jedd Ferris

THE DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD OF ATHLETIC SUCCESS

“Join Bode.” Leading up to the Olympics, Nike’s hypnotizing mantra resonated across every mainstream news outlet. His face was on Time and Newsweek, he was featured on 60 Minutes, and just like that we had our next subconscious urge to “Be Like Mike” or proclaim “I’m Tiger Woods.” Bode Miller was the poster child for a U.S. Ski team bound for glory. The stories of his greatness barely had anything to do with his world champion slope accomplishments, but instead were always focused on his hippie upbringing, reckless unorthodox style, and that he might show up to a race with last night’s Budweiser still on his breath. But people who knew nothing about skiing were all easily convinced he was the best, and just like that he was the new force-fed mainstream media-anointed immortal sports demigod.

Of course the campaign didn’t live up to its hype. Miller flopped in the face of his nonchalant attitude, and the whole team became a punch line as high medal hopes disintegrated with meager results. (To his credit, Miller did take top honors in Ski Racing magazine’s “greatest sex appeal” poll during the games.) The U.S. team’s lone savior was a distant contender named Ted Legity, who took gold in the men’s combined. So why was no one asking us to “Join Ted?” I guess it just didn’t have the same ring. Then again maybe it was the lack of pressure from hiding in Miller’s shadow that helped him coast to the top of the podium. After all it was Miller who eventually scoffed the media attention after one of his sub-par runs.

“Fame is almost a poison. I couldn’t care less, in fact I lived better when I was a nobody,” he told the told the Italian newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport during the Olympics. “Sport is born clean and it would stay that way if it was the athletes who ran it for the pleasure of taking part. But then the fans and the media intervene and finish up by corrupting it with the pressure that they exercise.”

Perhaps Miller’s words were an overreaction to frustration and embarrassment, but he certainly has a point. By the time the media was done with their pre-Games coverage, he was so far up on the mainstream pedestal that anything less than a weighted neck of gold would have seemed like failure.

Take a look at other one-named athletic icons: Lance, Pele, Gretsky, Jordan, Agassi. When an athlete reaches the point where the endorsements start stacking and the salary cap gets breached in their honor-that point where they become a self-metaphoric dream for every kid on every street corner playing pick-up hoops-it seems like the only place to go is down. Becoming a champion certainly helps, but it’s not everything. As skiing bad boy and Gold Medalist Jonny Moseley, who had the hype to rival Miller in the late 90s, told BRO in a recent interview, “People connect with not doing the status quo. Not everybody that wins a Gold Medal gets to host Saturday Night Live.”

Fans need that Hollywood star quality, so they can inevitably feed off the sensationalist aspects of celebrity-endless tabloid headlines on probes into doping, gambling, and high-profile romances. It sucks the life out of the actual sport-thriving on a hero’s personal failures. It became almost as intriguing to read about Lance splitting up with former fiancé Sheryl Crow, as it is to read about how well he did in Stage 3. His seven Tour wins became an expected afterthought in comparison to the celebrity monster that had been created.

Before all of the crazy attention and the “poison” of his fame, Miller said, “I owe it to myself and to a lot of other people-my coaches, my family, my teammates-to take the athletic side of ski racing as far as I can.” When he retreats back up to New Hampshire’s White Mountains with more money than most of us will ever see, and he takes some of those first runs that instilled his youthful passion, I wonder if he will rekindle that kind of desire and come back for gold in 2010. Or has the machine truly ruined it for one the world’s best? It’s obvious the emblazoned stigma chips away some part of the love of the game, or at least leaves a stain on the original purity. Popularity can ruin a sport just as fast as it can save it.