GRANBY RANCH, Colo. — During an early morning ski session with a handful of partners and children at Granby Ranch, where he recently announced he will be building a ski academy, Bode Miller provided the crew on hand with a quick tutorial in gliding on Saturday.

Inspired by American Bryce Bennett’s first ever World Cup victory in the Val Gardena-Groeden earlier that morning, Miller had his entourage line up for an impromptu gliding race across a flat section of the slope.

“On the Val Gardena course where Bryce Bennett won today, you have to know how to glide,” Miller said. “I’m not talking tiny little steps. You need to launch and really push with each stride.”

Leading the pack, Miller exhibited the technique during the makeshift competition as everyone else scrambled in his wake. 

He pointed out that a course like Val Gardena suits tall athletes. Long legs are a natural advantage, he said, not just on the gliding sections, but on the notoriously bumpy terrain.

Bennett, who had never finished on a World Cup podium until his victory Saturday, is 6 foot 7 inches tall. Steven Nyman, who has landed the only downhill victories of his career on the Val Gardena downhill course (in 2006, 2012 and 2014) stands 6 foot 4. 

“There’s the most terrain there of any downhill ever,” Miller said, recalling one year in particular when every racer was dramatically jostled from start to finish. “The year I’m talking about, you left the ground 35 or 40 times in the race because there was so much terrain, so many little jumps that you were constantly cameling and hopping.”

Guys like Bennett and Nyman, however, have built-in shock absorption. 

“They have long legs, so the terrain is littler for them,” Miller says. “It’s a small bump to them versus to [a much smaller person], it’s a chest-high bump. A bump is this high, followed by another bump that high and another bump that high. They have more suspension. They’re more comfortable with that range and smaller people just aren’t.”

At 6 foot 2, Miller says his own stature helped him to success on the Val Gardena course. He won the Gardena super G in 2006 and landed three ensuing podiums at the Italian venue during his race career – two in super G and one in downhill. 

It’s not that shorter athletes have no possibility of doing well at Val Gardena. Standing 5 foot 8 inches, Swiss speed sensation Beat Feuz is one of the circuit’s most compact racers,  but he won the Val Gardena SG in 2011 and has landed two downhill podiums there. He ended up fifth Saturday, less than a half a second off of the winning pace. However, the four guys ahead of him in Saturday’s DH —  Bennett, Otmar Striedinger, Niels Hintermann and Dominik Paris — are notably more statuesque, each standing at least six feet tall. 

 “Even if you only have a couple inches, it’s a huge difference when you compound it by 40 different pieces of terrain that you’re hitting,” Miller said. “It’s incremental so that you’re gaining on everybody.”