In a press conference last Thursday, Bode Miller announced that he will be ski racing again this season and, after a two-year hiatus racing on his own team, that he is rejoining the U.S. Ski Team.

After 12 years racing 341 World Cups, he took a break and reflected on his career — to figure out where he was at, what he wants to do with his life, where his goals are, and how important ski racing is.

As he said this, I remembered something Bob Beattie said after the Torino 2006 Olympic Winter Games. I was covering the NCAA Championships in Colorado in March 2006, and had a chance to interview Beattie, the U.S. Ski Team coach during the 1960s.

I asked what he thought of the U.S. Ski Team’s performance in Torino and about Miller, who made a name for himself at those Games, but not by winning medals. Although he finished fifth in downhill and sixth in giant slalom, the 2005 World Cup overall champion and 2005 World Champion in downhill and super G didn’t meet the public’s expectations. But he did appear to have fun.

But Beattie encountered even crazier problems at the 1964 Winter Olympics: Billy Kidd was reportedly ill with bronchitis before the giant slalom, Beattie fought endlessly with officials to get his racers better seeding, and one racer even had a run-in with the law.

Forty-two years later, Beattie was thinking a lot about what had happened in Torino and said Miller, in particular, needed time to reflect.

"He's a great athlete, I like him," Beattie said. “I think he was a disappointment to himself and to a lot of others. You would never know if you talked to him. He would have his party line. 'I was really happy,' he would say. 'I did just what I wanted to do.' He'll need to think about it, how important ski racing is. I don't think he knows what he wants to do in the future."

 

Over this past summer, it appears that Miller — the most decorated ski racer in U.S. history with 31 World Cup wins, two World Championship titles, two overall World Cup titles and six discipline titles, and wins in all five World Cup disciplines, from slalom to downhill — did what Beattie suggested.

But what exactly did he think about?

Ski racing, for one thing.

“I can relate to Brett Favre,” Miller said in the press conference. “You enjoy your sport. You dedicate your life to it, and you can see how it would be nice to walk away and try something new.

“Then you walk away and there’s obviously a big hole left where that sport was, especially in my case, it’s my main form of expression.”

Miller, who turns 32 in October, realized that he “still had some more to give.”

He spoke of talking to Sasha Rearick, who was named head coach of the U.S. men’s team following the 2008 season, and how the U.S. Ski Team has been supportive of Miller’s rejoining the team. He commented on how successful the team has been in recent years, and how the team’s program now “leaves no stones unturned.”

Neither Miller nor Rearick gave specifics about how the U.S. Ski Team has changed since Miller was last a member (were they not turning over stones previously?). But Miller used the word “positive” several times in describing the upcoming season, as in reintegrating with the team is a “real positive change,” and that he’s looking forward to performing at his “very highest level” at the Olympics and making everything positive, not “any kind of regurgitation of the past.”

Miller spoke of how he worked with Rearick years ago, and that he remembered having a similar “belief system” to Rearick’s — what Miller called “the inspiration aspect of the sport and the inspiration aspect of the training.”

What he did not say in the press conference is where his newfound inspiration is coming from. Certainly not the Olympics, which he said “wasn’t a huge motivation in [his] decision,” although he said he will compete if he qualifies.

While it is difficult to find anyone on the U.S. Ski Team willing to talk about Miller’s decision, it’s interesting to speculate how much his role as a dad has played in his new outlook. Last February, almost immediately after he said he was taking a break from the World Cup tour, he announced on his UniversalSports.com diary that he has a daughter, Dacey. At the time, she was a year old.

Although Dacey lives in California, Miller’s diary updates indicate that he travels to see her frequently — though no word on how many diapers he’s changed.

“They have a special relationship with their parents at this age,” he wrote on February 20, 2009. “You basically are their entire world. And that’s kind of cool because by the time she’s 13 she will probably want nothing to do with me.”

Maybe Miller has figured out what he wants to do with his future. He’s a dad, and speaking as a parent, nothing quite focuses your life and what you want to be when you grow up, like parenthood.

Could the man who once used a World Championship medal to hold up his toilet seat and who packed a World Cup crystal globe trophy in his luggage (where it was smashed) finally have found a reason to not only keep his awards but win more?

Just maybe Dacey will have something special to take for show-and-tell — her Daddy’s Olympic medal?