It took the hungriest skier in the world to take the meat off Bode Miller’s plate Thursday.
Once Miller was known as a skier who couldn’t finish. Now he can’t seem to finish out of the money. In seventh place and almost a full second out of the lead after the first leg of the giant slalom, Miller laid down the fastest time of the second run, coiling and springing around each turn like a Slinky descending a staircase.
He watched five more men come down the hill, unable to match him.
Then came a man who was not about to be late to dinner.
At 32, Austria’s Stephan Eberharter is in that formidable yet delicate position of having peaked at the end of his career, freighting each race with heavy emotional cargo. He came into the Olympics with a legitimate shot at three gold medals but had to settle for silver in the downhill, won by teammate Fritz Strobl, and bronze in the super-giant slalom, which went to the venerable Norwegian, Kjetil Andre Aamodt.
Eberharter, the leader after the first run, defended his turf in the second leg, storming down the course to win gold in a total time of 2 minutes 23.28 seconds, .88 of a second ahead of Miller. It was Miller’s second runner-up finish of the Games.
“He charged the whole way,” Miller said. “There were only a few people in the world who could have beaten him.”
Eberharter swept into the finish area with the wide arc of an arriving royal, looked at the scoreboard, then flopped on his back, his face shining with joy and relief.
“Today it worked,” he said. “Today I was the lucky one.”
Eberharter said he felt “loose” during the two-hour break between runs.
“I would be lying if I said I wasn’t thinking about the gold from time to time,” he said. “It was very special for me, but the real feelings will come in a few days, when I realize how many people I made happy, how many people were there with me, rooting for me.”
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Injured and out of shape in the mid-1990s, Eberharter fought his way back onto the Austrian team but could not close the gap between himself and celebrated teammate Hermann Maier on the World Cup circuit.
Eberharter’s neat set of medals should help eliminate any residue of doubt that he deserved mention in the same breath as Maier, who sat out this Olympics after a serious motorcycle accident.
Miller, meanwhile, single-handedly has prevented the U.S. alpine team from being shut out. Both his silver medals–in Thursday’s race and in the alpine combined last week–have come in events in which Americans had never finished on an Olympic podium.
On Saturday, the 24-year-old from northern New Hampshire could become the first U.S. skier to win three Olympic alpine medals if he performs well in his strongest event, the slalom.
Bronze medalist Lasse Kjus of Norway said a superimposed head-to-head replay of the second run showed that Miller took a tighter route than he did around two critical gates where the first steep section flows into the flat.
Miller’s second run nipped Eberharter’s by three-hundredths of a second.
“That’s one of my strengths,” Miller said. “I challenged the line. That’s not a place to really push it. That’s why I was able to go so fast. Most guys are just trying to stay on course.”
Park City’s Erik Schlopy missed a gate in the first run, hiked back up and finished with a 12-second deficit, next to last out of 73 men. Schlopy elected not to start the second run.
“I wanted to come to the finish with my family and my friends here in my hometown,” said Schlopy, who struggled with a bronchial infection early in the season and never recovered the form that made him the top U.S. hope in technical events coming into the Olympic year.
“This whole process is more about the journey than it is about the race. It’s been a wonderful journey, and the journey will continue.”