Bode Miller hasn’t made himself widely available for interviews this season. But at the 2010 Olympics, he’s seemed happy talking to reporters after the races. This afternoon, he sat down in a press conference and freely answered questions.

Bode can’t really be summarized. So I transcribed the press conference, word for word — mostly. Here’s the first part.

Q: How does this Olympics compare to Torino (2006 Olympic Winter Games)?
Bode: The comparisons are more for you guys to make. I’m the same person. I feel the same. Ski racing’s the same for me in a lot of ways.

In 2006, I didn’t feel very happy about where I was in a lot of ways. I talked about that in the summer leading up to it. I felt like being the favorite in five events or everyone saying that I was going to win in five events and refusing to listen to me when I told them that that was very unlikely, and that I didn’t ever really feel like I was interested in the medals or the results at that point.

Then, as it got closer and closer, I felt more and more trapped by what everyone else was saying. I had almost no ownership over my results or my situation at that time because too many people had said, “Oh, he’s going to win these medals and this is the way he skied and this is who he is and this is how he acts.”

When everyone says that about you for that long to millions and millions of people, you don’t feel like you have ownership of you or your own actions anymore. Anything you do is already what someone else said you should do. Essentially, they rob you of your freedom to be who you are.

A lot of the way I acted there was simply a result of feeling like that was the case. I wasn’t focused on racing. I wasn’t focused on enjoying myself. I was taking back my freedom and taking back my ownership of who I was as a racer and as a person. I think that was a really negative place to be going into an Olympics. It’s obviously not where you’d wish anybody to be going into an Olympics or any ski racing event at any point in your life.

In a way, that is still all separate for me because when I got on the race hill, I still races as hard as I can, and I easily could have won medals there also. It was very very close.

Here, I came in after being able to walk away from the sport for a little bit and [then] rejoining the U.S. Ski Team. I sort of made all my own choices now. No one tried to jump in there and say what I was going to do or who I was or how I was going to act. Not that I’m that much of a baby that that bothers me that much.

But when it’s 100s of millions of people, it’s really a frustrating position to be in. It feels much better to own your actions. I said that at that beginning of the year that I was hoping that my training and my skiing and my actions would speak more loudly than I think [they] have.

Q: What do you want to get out of a race when you stand in the start, particularly in the Olympics?

Bode: You want to be proud of what you’ve done. If you don’t know how to analyze your own results or your disposition or attitude or approach, no one else can really do that for you. Anyone else’s version is apt to have flaws in it. I want to have results where when I come down, I know that I did something excellent, whether it’s enough to win or not is a lot of time dependent on other variables. Whether I think I did something excellent is dependent only on whether I did or not. It’s always been important to me.

I got asked a question today on why I think I was able to come back and perform at the Olympics when I couldn’t in the other one. I said most likely it was because that’s what I decided I wanted to do. When I was going into ’06, it was not something that I wanted to do. There’s something really important about that. It sounds simple but I think that’s the truth.

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More to come tomorrow …