Carving horse bode miller, Ski racing’s favorite bad boy, Bode Miller, has emerged in the last year a changed man: married, a father of two, and training for his final Olympics, the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia. He’s also dealt with tragedy—the sudden death of his 29-year-old snowboarding brother—and reevaluated what he wants to prioritize in life. And looking, for the first time, at a sport beyond his ski events, Miller has added an unusual goal to his bucket list: to own a Triple Crown winner. As the 139th Kentucky Derby approaches, Miller—who says he hasn’t skipped a Derby since 1999—talks about his life ahead, and how horses and skiers are more similar than you’d think.ne year ago, at the 138th running of the Kentucky Derby, a three-year-old Thoroughbred colt named Bodemeister jumped out of the gates at Churchill Downs, grabbed an early lead, and began to set one of the most blistering paces of the race’s history. No horse had ever won in such a fashion, by leading from the break to the wire. And indeed, it wasn’t to be: 150 yards from the finish, the long-shot pick I’ll Have Another surged from behind to claim victory by a length and a half.
It was horse racing at its finest, but a particularly gut-wrenching loss for two men: Bob Baffert, Bodemeister’s trainer, and the American ski racer Bode Miller—the namesake of Baffert’s then eight-year-old son, Bode, and by extension, the horse. “Those were heartbreaking,” Miller says of Bodemeister’s losses at the Derby and Preakness, which the horse lost in similar fashion. “I know a lot about tough losses.”
And what is ski racing’s favorite rock ’n’ roller doing trackside at genteel Churchill Downs, with a namesake in the running? Miller, 35, is one of his sport’s most decorated Americans with five Olympic medals, five World Championship medals, and 33 World Cup wins. But much has changed in his life lately. He skipped last year’s season to have knee surgery, and has talked about retirement. The 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia, he says, will be his last. Perhaps more tellingly, Miller has begun to sow the seeds of a grown-up, settled life: in October, he married the pro-volleyball player and model Morgan Beck, 26, after a five-month courtship.
And for the first time, he’s looking past the slopes at what might seem an unlikely new pursuit: last summer, he bought his first racehorse. “I’m always thinking about what I like to do with my time,” he says now. “I fell in love with horse racing and realized I enjoyed the whole process—I’d love to eventually be a trainer or put together a group that would buy and train horses.And while he acknowledges the challenges of jumping into the sport late in life, that’s where Bob Baffert comes in. The Hall of Fame racehorse trainer—whose steeds have won the Kentucky Derby three times, the Preakness Stakes five times, and Belmont once—has been a Miller fan, he says, since the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, where the then 25-year-old skier won his first two Olympic medals. “I said to my wife, ‘Hey, you got to watch this guy. He’s just so good. If I ever have another child and it’s a boy, I’m going to name him Bode,’” Baffert says. In 2004, Baffert did just that. And a year later, he met Miller for the first time at the Kentucky Derby. The pair struck up a friendship.
Now, Baffert says, “Bode’s like a brother to me.” More recently, they’ve formed a business partnership, beginning to buy and train racehorses together. These days, Miller rises before dawn on Derby day to watch the horses’ pre-race workouts—he hasn’t missed a Derby since 1999—and says he sees many similarities between horse racing and ski racing. “Horse racing requires a lot of patience and tolerance for loss. It’s probably the only sport that has the same win percentage as skiing,” he says. “If you win 7, 8 percent of the time, you’re the best in the history of your sport. That’s the way horse racing is, too. You need that kind of patience.” Miller should know: of 408 World Cup starts, he has won only 33 races. There’s also an unfiltered, honest quality about horse racing that attracts Miller, who says, “I think there’s something really raw about horses, in that there’s no ego—maybe they do have an ego, but it doesn’t show.
They have a really pure motivation, a really pure effort. That’s something that really appeals to me.” He describes Carving, the first horse he bought with Baffert, as having “a lot of heart.” Carving did well: he won three of seven races and $172,150 in prize money. But then he began to slow down, and Baffert and Miller sold him in March. While his horse-racing hobby bloomed into a more serious pursuit over the summer of 2012, so did his romance with Beck. In the weeks after that year’s Derby, Miller visited his agent in New York. In the office, he spotted a picture of Beck, who now goes by Miller, a slender, six-foot-two-inch, blonde-haired, blue-eyed stunner, and a fellow client of the agency.
Miller asked for her phone number. Not long afterward, the two were in Fort Lauderdale at the same time. He called Beck and asked if he might come watch her tournament. She said no. He persisted until she finally relented. He came to every match of her tournament, and when it ended, they were a couple. “When I saw her play, I really felt like I got to know a lot about her. It’s one of those things where, watching someone play a sport, you see a lot of the raw emotion,” Miller says. “She was really authentic out there, and I was sure she was someone I would like.” It took two dates, says Ms. Miller, who is charming, down-to-earth, and articulate, before the skier proclaimed to her that the two were “soul mates.” Within a month and a half, he’d bought an engagement ring. However, Ms. Miller, who had been married previously, wanted to focus on her career and hoped “to slow things down” with her new beau. That didn’t sit well with Miller. “I’m a racer,” he says. “I don’t go slow.” By October, Miller and Beck were married, and they say their domestic life is remarkably normal. They shop for furniture, cook dinner, do laundry. They also play a lot of sports, particularly tennis and golf. They squabble playfully over the correct telling of their love story, whether Ms.
Miller will use her maiden or married name professionally (for now, it’s Miller), and over Miller’s tendency to disappear for hours to watch videos of racehorses, which he claims, “has never happened.”On its surface, theirs has been a fairy-tale romance, full of jet-set adventures—to Austria, to London, to a wellness spa in Arizona—and the stuff of Hollywood movies: fancy cars, boats, beautiful girl meets her prince. But their first year of marriage has been beset with hardship, as well. In December, Miller nearly blinded his wife in a golfing accident. Weeks later, the couple announced they were expecting a baby. In January, Ms. Miller miscarried, while at the same time her husband became embroiled in a paternity suit with another woman, Sara McKenna, who claimed that Miller was the father of her unborn child. Then, on April 7, Miller’s younger brother, 29-year-old Chelone Miller, a professional snowboarder, died after suffering a seizure thought to be related to a traumatic brain injury he sustained in a motorcycle accident in 2005. “One of the things that we try and focus on,” Ms. Miller says, “is living day by day, taking on whatever comes our way.”
As for a family of their own, they’ve decided to postpone the endeavor while both athletes pursue their careers, but they’re excited to welcome Miller’s son with McKenna into their lives. “Even though I’m not having a baby, we have a new baby that we get to love and take care of. We’re really focused on being a part of his life and creating a safe, loving home for him,” she says. And Ms. Miller has embraced her husband’s five-year-old daughter from a previous relationship, happily taking on the role of stepmother. While their plan for a child of their own is on pause, she’s dead set on making the 2016 Olympic beach-volleyball squad, and he has set the mark high for what he’d like to accomplish in what might be his last season: He wants to race every race in every discipline for an entire season and break the record on the men’s side for the most World Cup points tallied in a single season. He’d like to take home the World Cup overall title again and become the first American male to win the downhill globe. He wants to win the Hahnenkamm, ski racing’s most prestigious crown, which only two other Americans have ever won.
He’d also like to collect a few more Olympic medals—all of this in addition to maintaining some balance in his life. And where so often athletes compromise their personal lives, Miller doesn’t buy into that philosophy. “I don’t really believe in sacrifice. I believe there’s a natural balance that’s always going to be found. You have to make those decisions based on where your priorities are,” he says. “When your priorities are ‘I want to be a skier and I want to go eat pizza all day,’ then that makes it a little bit easier. But when your priorities are ‘I want to win the overall and have a season that’s never been done on the men’s side before’ and ‘I want to be a good father and a good husband and manage the rest of my personal life,’ then it’s a little more difficult.” But this Bode Miller—mature, grounded, refreshed—feels up to the task. “I’m excited for it,” he says. “I’m in a place now where I much more capable of doing that stuff than I was 5 years ago, 10 years ago.” All that in addition, he says, to a Derby win.
Of horse racing, he says, “I’m interested in pursuing it and seeing where it goes, but like any top-level sport, it’s tough.” He’s excited about his new horse Icy Ride, a 16-foot chestnut Thoroughbred he bought with Baffert in March. The two-year-old colt traces his lineage to Candy Ride, an unbeaten Argentine miler. “Icy Ride is really masculine—he’s really rough, and big, and very aggressive, and definitely has a lot of spirit,” Miller says. Baffert agrees, describing the horse as strong and big-bodied, with a tough mind. “He’s not skittish at all,” Baffert says. Miller adds, “We expect a Triple Crown winner. That’s what we’re going for.” At the moment, Icy Ride rests at Baffert’s barn in Santa Anita, California, where he’s training to make a go at the 2014 Kentucky Derby. Baffert is deciding which horses he’ll run at Churchill Downs this Saturday. The Millers are preparing for this year’s Derby; she has yet to buy her hat, though her husband hopes she’ll wear one. With Bode Miller, one can only guess what the next year will bring. In the meantime, Icy Ride waits at Baffert’s stable, growing bigger, tougher,
9 years ago
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