Miller: Skiing 'like a banshee' in Vancouver

VANCOUVER -- Yesterday was pretty fun. It obviously would have been nice to be a tenth faster but it was good. I was psyched about the way I skied and that's important. I didn't have the best visibility in the middle part. When the race first started, visibility was really, really bad. It got consistently better the whole time. When I went, it was definitely a lot better than it was in the beginning. It wasn't sunny yet so the middle section was dark and there were some rattly bumps. They changed the course a little bit from the training run days. They put some extra water in it and the slippers made a bunch of ridges which made it kind of weird. Visibility was important in that middle section because if you had good visibility, you could just kinda ride over the ridges. When I went, I was bouncing into them and my legs were kind of stiff. I over-skied one turn a little bit because I couldn't see that well. I wanted to give myself extra room and that cost me a bunch. Aksel and Defago made up a lot of time on me right there. They both skied great and executed. With the visibility the way it was when I went, it didn't really make sense to take a ton of risk there. Under the circumstances, I feel like I skied really well. If I brought in more risks, I would have brought in more possibilities for mistakes and couldn't have really gone much faster.

Getting a bronze in the first race doesn't really change much for me. I'm looking forward to all of the remaining four races. I've done a lot of work this season and have gotten fit and healthy now to where I can ski pretty much 100 percent in all of the events. I'm ready to ski hard in every event and that's the most important thing.

I was really nervous before the race yesterday. I let myself get pretty fired up, which I normally don't let myself do. But I just went out of the gate like a banshee -- I was just charging 100 percent. That was sort of what I've been talking about -- wanting to ski kind of open, just trying to go as fast as I could and not really worrying about the tactics it was going to take to win. I just want to race hard and go 100 percent and hopefully let my skills keep me out of trouble and make it down. That was what I did yesterday and I was pretty excited about it. Overall, I was pretty happy. I performed right where my expectations were. I was just a tenth out of the gold medal but I also could have been fourth or fifth too. When I came across the line I thought I wasn't going to get a medal because I knew I had lost some time across the middle and the bottom. I think racing that way is more fun. I was psyched.

We got dumped on again last night which is why the super combined got canceled. It's nice to have the day off today but it is tough with this kind of weather. We all kind of knew that this is what it would be like coming in here. I knew that weather was going to be one of the big challenges here. Just being ready each day and being able to deal with the delays and cancellations. Not really knowing what conditions you are going to end up racing on because in some cases I needed to switch skis and change stuff around. That can be a little bit stressful for the technicians too. There are a lot of different variables you'd prefer not to have in play when you are at a big event like this, but at the same time it's all part of the game.