Anja Niedringhaus / AP

Bode Miller finished sixth overall in the giant slalom Monday, coming up short in his fourth event of the Games.

In fact, a U.S. Olympic team sports psychologist once told me, that’s the right attitude, because you can’t control the results; you can’t control what other people do or what golfers call the rub of the green. Sometimes, excrement occurs. And if you go out and try to win instead of trying to do your best, you strangle your own talent.

That attitude won Miller last year’s World Cup. He didn’t worry about winning races. He thought only of skiing the perfect race.

He was brilliant last year, skiing every race when everyone told him to take a week off now and then because the schedule and physical beating inherent in the sport would wear him down. He ignored the advice and kept on skiing, not as much to win as to meet his own expectations of how he should ski.

But something happened between then and now. People who know him and the way he lives say that he didn’t put a lot of time into training during the summer, didn’t get himself into peak shape for the year that would define his legacy.

And it goes back to what you put into the race. That sports psychologist also pointed out that part of controlling what you do is preparing as well as you can, which means doing all the work, getting yourself into the best possible condition, being as ready as you can possibly be for the moment of truth.

That’s the part Miller neglected — the being prepared part. Trying to be perfect is wonderful, but you can’t do it with a battered body that is no longer in the shape it once was.

As I said, he’s still capable of a medal along the line, but he’s no longer capable of Olympic greatness. To even dream that he’d win the next three races is no more than a fantasy. He’s shown what he’s made of, and it’s not the stuff of champions.

He keeps saying he’s cool with that, that it doesn’t matter what others think and it doesn’t matter if he wins or loses. I wonder if he’ll still think that 10 years from now, when he looks back at what might have been instead of what was.