He was the "Great American Hype"; the skiier who would claim four US Olympic gold medals and come back to claim his picture on the box of an ever popular General Mills cereal associated with Olympic champions since the days of Bruce Jenner.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the Olympics. Somewhere along the line, the skier Bode Miller traded places with the spoiled Ivy League fratboy, and Olympic dreams were derailed. He bragged before the Olympics about hitting the slopes wasted, and apparently used that as his strategy for success coming into Turin. When he arrived, he didn't look up the number of the local ski lodge, but rather, of the local Italian pub. Shots mattered more than slopes to Miller.
This was the most overhyped, underrealized Winter Olympics in US history. Anton Ohno proved his inability to win consistently without a judge's decision, Sasha Cohen snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in a rather underwhelming long program, and besides the much heralded ice dancing (umm, it's ICE DANCING...do I really need to elaborate on the ridiculousness of this "sport"; the winter Olympics equivalent of synchronized swimming?) and curling (one of only two professional sports, bowling being the other, where drinking while performing can actually ENHANCE your performance), US athletes consistently failed to live up to their potential. While there was a share of the "agony of defeat" borne out by actual physical injuries, it was mental errors, not physical limitations, that halted the dream of this crew. Bode Miller simply personified the mental failures that accompanied his colleagues.
But the good news about the Winter Olympics is, we only care when you win. If you lose, it's no mark against you; we've come to expect it. So the few Olympic "heroes" who will come home (expect ticker tape for the ice dancing heroes; expect me to be hospitalized with hypoxia for laughing at it) will get their due on the morning talk show circuit; the busts will disappear into obscurity and the occasional chapstick commercial.