America at Large:  'Downhill Racer Drinks" ought to be a Dog-Bites-Man story if ever there was one, but when CBS profiled Bode Miller on its 60 Minutes programme the other night, the ensuing controversy managed to knock the NFL play-offs right off the front pages of the sports sections.

Miller, in case you didn't know it - and until last Sunday night, it's a safe bet that most Americans didn't - is the US's top medal hope in skiing at the coming Turin Olympics. He won two silvers at Salt Lake four years ago, and last year became the first American skier in 22 years to become the overall World Cup champion.

He has concomitantly earned a reputation as the king of après-ski partying, and in the course of his interview with CBS admitted there had been occasions after an all-night session throwing back vodka shooters "when I've been in really tough shape at the top of the course".

"Talk about a hard challenge right there. If you ever tried to ski when you're wasted, it's not easy," said Miller. "It's risky, you know. You're putting your life at risk there. It's like driving drunk, only there's no rules about it in ski racing."

Almost immediately, the switchboards began to light up in the offices of the United States Ski Federation. Some of the calls were from do-gooder groups like Madd (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), but many were from corporate sponsors, distressed by the suggestion that their contributions were being used to fund an international booze-fest.

Miller was off skiing in Europe, but, presumably at the suggestion of his public relations people, he quickly went into damage control mode and claimed he'd never exactly competed while, you know, polluted: "I've never drunk alcohol within hours of racing," wrote Miller in the online journal he writes for the Denver Post. "That incident at the World Cup finals was the hardest I've ever had to push through to make it. I stopped partying super-late, and we raced at 10am.

"Being hung over is a form of impairment, though," he admitted. "It's really hard to race that way."

Now, whether a fellow who's tossed them down with the ski bunnies until five in the morning is still drunk at 10, or merely "hung over", strikes me as a matter of semantics. (The litmus test, it seems to me, ought to be "Would you want him driving your children's school bus?") But on the other hand, that's a decision that might better be left to Bode himself. Given the logistics of Olympic-style racing, it seems unlikely an impaired competitor is likely to injure anyone but himself.

And as Picabo Street, another accomplished American skier (and former Miller team-mate) pointed out, Bode's intemperate remarks might just be a reflection of "how he skis".

"He's mouthing off right now, but it's how he lives - on the edge all the time," noted Street.

Miller does remind me, in more than one way, of another American skier, Bill Johnson. At Sarajevo in 1984, Johnson was considered brash and arrogant when he predicted he would win the gold medal in the downhill. Austria's Franz Klammer, for instance, called Johnson "a nose-picker" and dismissed his chances.

That was reason enough for me to select Bill Johnson in one of those pick-the-winner competitions the Olympic organisers were sponsoring in the press room. Johnson went on to win the downhill, finishing ahead of a gaggle of Swiss and Austrians. (Klammer finished 10th.) The hammered brass clock that was awarded to the winning prognosticator stopped working long ago, but I still have it after all these years.

Time was not kind to Johnson. Seven years after his Olympic triumph he crashed out going 70mph at the US Championships in Whitefish, Montana, and suffered traumatic brain injuries as well as a severed tongue. He was in a coma for three weeks and suffered significant memory loss for the next half-dozen years. A few years ago, he was stopped on suspicion of drunken driving, and when he attempted to protest that he hadn't been drinking at all, the police interpreted his slurred speech as confirmation that he had been. He was charged with resisting arrest on top of the DWI, at least until the breathalyzer revealed that his blood/alcohol content was 0.00.

It's a safe bet it's been awhile since Bode Miller would have tested 0.00, and this isn't the first time he's been the centre of controversy. He recently described the drug-testing procedures of his sport as "a joke", and appeared to suggest that skiing might be better off if restrictions on performance-enhancing drugs were relaxed or dispensed with altogether.

But that's not exactly the point here. The backlash of the 60 Minutes segment has US ski officials in high dudgeon - federation president Bill Marolt flew off to Switzerland this week to personally reprimand the Party Dude, and US coach Phil McNichol openly questioned whether the Wild and Crazy guy ought to be wearing the US colours at Turin at all.

"He's always tried to be a rebel, which was okay because it was fun sometimes and actually brought a lot of thinking outside the box and pushed the barriers," McNichol told journalists two days ago. "However, it's grown to a place where it's no longer about being opinionated and outspoken. It's about how much do I really want to be here?"

Then the coach cut to the chase and revealed what this firestorm is really all about: its potential impact on corporate funding.

"The team has done a pretty decent job trying to manage a guy who doesn't want to be managed," said McNichol. "There's a tremendous disconnect with how serious this is. It could have tremendous bearing on our ability to raise money."