Sports

Bode goes from cynic to cheer-worthy in one race

VANCOUVER — This time, there was no way to rehearse the too-cool-for-school act, mostly because nobody was paying attention. Four years ago, Bode Miller entered the Turin Olympics as the cover boy of the U.S. Olympic team, a surefire bet to ski straight from the mountains of Italy to the billboards of Madison Avenue.

He ended those Games as the poster boy for slackers, cynics and underachievers everywhere.

“I wasn’t emotionally involved in the races,” Miller admitted yesterday, after erasing four years of bad blood with two minutes of sublime soul. “I was treating them very cold and clinical and just executing my plan.”

Four years after going 0-for-Turin, after flaming out brilliantly, Miller came careening down the Whistler Creekside mountain, a blur against the white snow and the blue course outline, and he gave us the one thing we begged him to give us four years ago. He showed that there really is blood coursing through his veins, that there really is emotion stored in his heart.

At the end of his electric downhill run, right after he kicked up the snow and stared at his time — 1:54.40 — he did precisely what you’re supposed to do when you come to the Olympics and you kill it: He slammed both hands against his helmet, flashed a smile that belied all the manufactured rebellion and posing Miller did when he was the sport’s hottest name.

Now he was just competitor No. 8, athlete No. 532431, a guy who sat in first place in the Olympic downhill, the leader in the clubhouse who would have to sit and see if that would be good enough while 56 other skiers took their shot at Creekside.

“It’s the Olympics,” Miller gushed later on, in a way that probably would have made him cringe four years ago. “You can feel it all the time. You can feel it when you go into the Opening Ceremony. You feel it all the time.”

By the end back in 2006, he had become impossible to root for. This was after describing the buzz of skiing drunk on “60 Minutes,” after staying out late the night before the downhill, after complaining about his room, after failing to medal in any of his five events. Mostly, it was after he had all but poured a beer bong over the notion of what the Olympics are supposed to be.

Now it was impossible not to feel good for him as a parade of skiers dragged in well behind him. It was impossible not to flinch when Nor way’s Aksel Svindal wound up sneaking past by two-hundredths of a second, harder still not to wince when Switzerland’s Di dier Defago bettered them both by an other seven-hun dredths of a second shortly thereafter.

“Whet her I had a medal or not, I’m not sure it would have made a huge difference,” Miller said later, and with an earnestness that was absolutely believable. But the medal would still be a nice bonus. And so it was: Forty-six more skiers left the starting gate and 46 more skiers sliced their way down the snow, and no one else came within a tenth of a second of scaring Miller off the medal stand. When it was over, when the bronze was his, he did a most un-cool thing:

He smiled. He cheered. He celebrated. And so did everyone else, even the Canadians, who are the same kind of suckers for comebacks and redemption as we are. Four years after skiing himself into a one-man cautionary tale, Bode Miller had written an entirely different chapter. And he wasn’t afraid to wear his emotions along with his goggles, his skis and his poles as a part of his standard uniform.

“Normally as an athlete, you kind of repress that stuff,” he said. “In general, it doesn’t help you get a great performance. You tend to get over-amped, make mistakes, do dumb stuff because you’re too fired up. I used to do it all the time. I used to crash all the time because of it.”

And he wasn’t done.

“I wanted to let the feelings kind of go and let myself be emotionally involved in the race and push,” he said. “I think I did that today.”

He did. It was a hell of a thing to see.

michael.vaccaro@nypost.com