Mike Celizic

SESTRIERE, Italy - It wasn’t the beer before the downhill, his hell-bent-for-leather style in the combined slalom, his DNF in the super-G or his first-run struggles in the giant slalom that did in Bode Miller. It was all the beers in all the months leading up to the Olympics and all the years of living his life as recklessly as he skis his races.

You don’t get many chances in life to climb to the pinnacle of your business. For Olympic athletes, three cycles is usually the max, and one of those is when you’re young and brash, one is when maturity should complement talent and the final one is when you’re riding on experience and conditioning.

Miller had his young Olympics in Salt Lake City when he won America’s only two medals in Alpine skiing, both of them silver. He came to Sestriere and the Turin Olympics with a world championship in hand along with the experience of a 28-year-old athlete who should have been at the peak of his power. The way he’s going, there’s not going to be anything left for 2010 and Vancouver.

Miller has quite simply cheated himself of his own talent and potential. It was all there waiting for him, the same kind of acclaim and dominance that Austrian Tony Sailer first exhibited when he swept three events — all the Olympics had — in 1956 and that Frenchman Jean-Claude Killy equaled in 1968.

Miller didn’t have to win all five events, but the downhill, slalom and giant slalom would have equalled what Sailer and Killy did. And even though Miller is not the world’s greatest downhiller, it was in his grasp, because he is the world’s greatest skiing talent.

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He might yet collect a medal — perhaps even a gold — because the slalom is Saturday and he is capable of winning any race on any day. But he has already blown his shot at greatness.

When he came up, his best race was the slalom. Tuesday night in Sestriere, after having won the downhill leg of the combined event, he straddled a gate in the slalom while trying to stay ahead of Austria’s slalom hotshot, Benjamin Raich.

You could defend Miller for his fifth-place finish in the downhill, even though he had a medal nailed down until a brutal mistake on the very bottom of the course. You can also defend his giant slalom, since he came back so strong in the second run. But you can’t defend him straddling a gate like a barstool. You can’t defend the previous five slaloms he ran, every one of which ended in a disqualification. And you definitely can't defend his DNF in the super-G.

When you can’t do what you do best, you simply haven’t put the work in. And, by all accounts, work and Miller are not the closest of acquaintances.

It takes years of training and dedication to win an Olympic gold medal. It doesn’t take nearly as many years of taking yourself and your talent for granted to lose it.

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Blame all of us in the media for some of this. It has been evident all year that Miller was not the same skier this year that he was last when he won the World Cup, skiing’s equivalent of NASCAR’s Nextel Cup. We kept writing about him as if a return to form was just around the corner.

Silly us. The reality is clear that Miller took his talent for granted for too long. Last summer especially, when he should have been getting himself into supreme shape for the biggest skiing meet he’d ever be in, he partied instead. It had always been there for him. It would be there again.

Don’t blame beer for this. It’s what he did between beers. Skiers drink — a lot. Just about all of them. And downhillers, who run on such a ragged edge and chase enormous adrenaline highs, can out-drink them all. But the next morning, the champions get up and work it off. They work as hard as they play not because they love work — most of them don’t like it any more than the rest of us do — but because they want to win, and if that’s what it takes, that’s what they do.

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Miller has always portrayed himself as an artist. He looks at what he does as a performance piece that has to be perfect. The result doesn’t matter; the process does. Put another way, if you do your job as perfectly as possible, the results will take care of themselves.

“One of the good things about my career is I have such extensive knowledge, so I always go as hard as I can,” Miller told The Associated Press on Monday. “Some guys can go 70-80 percent and get results, but I wouldn’t do that.

“If things went well, I could be sitting on four medals, maybe all of them gold.”

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