AVON — Bode Miller has spent his adult life winning and losing races by hundredths of seconds, but now he’s in a race measured by a countdown of days.
Miller had in his lower back. He has not raced this season and time is running out before the world alpine championships, Feb. 2-15 at Beaver Creek.
He returned to easy skiing two weeks ago and has trained here the past two days in hopes of racing Jan. 16-18 at Wengen, Switzerland, and the following weekend at Kitzbuehel, Austria.
“I think I’m in a good position at least in terms of, when we did the surgery, we were hoping this is where I would be, and it was very optimistic to hope this is where I was going to be,” said Miller, 37. “Whether that means I’m going to make the next step in the next week and a half, two weeks to be able to race Wengen and Kitzbuehel and then world championships is a real question mark. There’s no way to know at what point I’ll hit stoppage with my disc structure or fitness. I’m not going to take any risk if I don’t think I can do it effectively.”
Miller has won four world championships gold medals and six Olympic medals, most recently . He has won four times on the Birds of Prey course where the championships will unfold.
Miller said he had to stop training Thursday after two runs of giant slalom because it was “too much for right now. It was steep and pretty turny and really aggressive snow. It was clear that my back was getting too much pressure, too much movement.”
There’s another issue. Even if Miller feels up to racing at world championships, teams can only enter four racers in each event. Steve Nyman and Travis Ganong have won World Cup downhills this season, and Marco Sullivan has a top-five finish.
“Whether I would (race) or not isn’t really the question, it’s whether my team would put me in,” Miller said. “I have a good track record on this hill, so I think they would have good argument (for including him). But at the same time we have a strong team right now with two guys winning World Cups this year already. They would have an argument to say, ‘We’re going to put in the strongest team we think we have.’ “
John Meyer: 303-954-1616, jmeyer@denverpost.com or twitter.com/johnmeyer
