Bode Miller says “night and day” boot adjustment helps his chances in speed{mosimage}Bode Miller’s chances of winning the overall title depend greatly on how he does this weekend in the last two speed races of the regular World Cup season. If he can keep up with (or beat) Austria’s Hermann Maier in the downhill and super G at Kvitfjell, Norway, he’ll be well-positioned for the World Cup Finals, March 10-14 in Sestriere, Italy.

Miller is confident in his speed racing. Despite relatively poor results in those events all season, he did well in the most recent downhill, finishing eighth in the downhill at St. Anton, Austria on February 14.

After those races, he described to Ski Racing the boot adjustments he’d made in the training run for St. Anton, and how that has an impact on his ability to absorb terrain in courses such as the one at Kvitfjell:

‘It’s been an issue all year with trying to find a way to push on the right spot on the ski. Mostly in tech events, but I use the same boots for all events. I kept ramping up higher and higher, to try to get so I could push on the front of the ski, because the front of the ski cuts so hard with both my tech-event skis right now.

So I got up pretty high. I’m a good four millimeters higher in the heel than in the toe. Plus, I have a decent amount of ankle flexion in the boot. I dropped the heel way down in the boot, so that my shin is really far forward. When I stand there with my boots all buckled, my knees are way out in front of my bindings. It’s great. I can stand out on the front of my skis all the time. In tech events it’s awesome. Unless I hit bumps.

When I hit bumps, the tip of the ski hits the bump and it flexes the boot. It means I can’t absorb it. My knee is so far forward, there’s no way. That’s part of the reason I was blowing out in GS last year. I popped out of the bindings a couple of times. It’s exceptional. It’s much more than everybody else, how much ankle drive I have. It’s great on smooth snow. It’s really fast. But if it does get rough, the boot goes into max flexion and then it has to go somewhere. There’s no way to control that. It’s all flexed-up. The plastic rebounds, it pushes the ski away, and everything is exaggerated. It takes a lot longer to re-settle the ski on the snow. Especially in the speed events, where you’re hitting bumps eighty percent of the time.

On long turns especially, your ski is flopping around all the time. And if your knee bounces each time it just digs in and you end up losing huge amounts of time. But when I go upright, then I’m not pushing on the right part of the ski. We’ve been working on that.

In the speed events I think it was a lot easier to do. I moved the mounting position a little bit back. It seems like you should go forward, but when you go forward the ski just pulls too much. It feels almost like you have to push further forward then. When you go back, you sit on a part of the sidecut where you can stand down and you’re actually gripping more through the heel. As you start going back on the part of the sidecut that starts getting wider, that’s the part that grips. Even if it is pulling you back, at least you’re a little more upright. Still, it’s a fine line in there.

It was night and day in that last training run (at St. Anton). Even though I was standing up on the last training run, over long turns and through the terrain, it was a hundred percent better.’