Bode Miller could have partied all night with the Swedish bikini team, come to the start house with a lampshade on his head, and if he had snagged a gold medal, it would have been just another chapter in the legend.

Instead, he was seen having some beers with his buds around midnight, showed up just an hour before the race and bombed in the race that will define his career. In just a bit less than two minutes on a brilliantly sunny day in the mountains of northern Italy, Bode went from ski hero to ski bum.

Yes, that’s harsh, especially with four more events ahead of him, any or all of which could yield medals. But, believe me, two golds in the slalom events do not equal one gold in the downhill.

If you want to be the world’s greatest skier, you have to win the Olympic downhill. The world accepts no substitutes.

The downhill is to the Winter Games what the 100-meter dash is to the Summer Games. It’s the defining moment in Alpine sports, the absolute scariest, hairiest event a mainline athlete can enter, an unbridled kamikaze assault on a mountain, riding the slender edges of a couple of high-tech boards on a track of ice at speeds of up to 80 mph.

You get a shot at it just once every four years. That’s it. One run. No mulligans, no do-overs. It is literally now or never.

If ever there is a time to get a good night’s sleep and maybe skip the beer the night before, the night before the downhill might be that time. If ever there were a time to get to the hill early instead of just before your start time, the day of the downhill also would be a good time.

Miller did neither. If he’s one of those people who want to see how far they can push the rules before they get caught, he’s just got the answer, which is not as far as he’s been pushing.

We can’t get inside Miller’s head, which is probably a good thing, because it’s probably loaded with clutter.

He has always enjoyed a beer or eight, even on nights before big races. Last year, he won the World Cup title, and it’s hard to criticize anyone’s habits when he ends the season as the best in the world at what he does.

But this year has been chaos from the start. Even before the infamous “60 Minutes” interview when he confessed to skiing “wasted,” he was taking shots at drug testing, the International Ski and Snowboard Federation and anything else that wandered into his line of fire.

The more he talked, the more he was pursued by the media and the worse he skied. By the time he rolled into Italy, he was telling the media that we shouldn’t concentrate so much on medals.

Now, it’s a lot easier to climb on his case – or six-pack – about the partying. That’s what happens when you finish fifth in the biggest race of your life. People start wanting to know why.

If he won, no problem with having some beers at midnight and leaving for the race an hour before it started. But lose, and it’s a different story. Everything is fair game.

Miller said little after the race, relaying his comments through skiing officials and not facing the mass of the media.

“I was super aggressive,” he said. “Made some little, small mistakes, but that’s normal when you’re pushing that hard.

“I was really fired up and I wanted to execute the race. I did execute, but I just didn’t have the speed.”

Actually, that’s not quite right. He started 18th, eight spots behind Austrian Michael Walchhofer, who held the first spot until the very last skier in the first group, Antoine Deneriaz of France, knocked .07 of a second off the Austrian’s time.

At the fifth of five intermediate checkpoints on the course, Miller had cut into Walchhofer’s lead and was just .08 seconds behind. Many racers had made up time on the bottom of the course, and it looked as if Miller would nail down a medal of some color, even if it wasn’t gold.

But he blew the final couple of turns on the course, blew them badly. In a relative smidgen of real estate, a .08-second deficit turned into .42 and Miller was out of a medal and into a new controversy.

It was there for him, and it wasn’t a matter of not carrying enough speed. It was a matter of blowing it at the end, the part of the race that champions conquer, the part of the race that ate up Bode.

There are still the slaloms, he said, not to mention the downhill combined. Big whoop. The one race he had to show up for at the peak of his powers was Sunday, and he stayed up late, arrived late, blew up late, and went home early without chatting personally with his buddies in the media.

That’s probably just as well. Miller doesn’t need to make any more statements in the media; he needs to make them on the slopes.

-- Mike Celizic