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Snowboarder
Ryan Miller: Out on the Slopes
By Jim
Buzinski
Outsports.com
Snowboarder Ryan Miller suffers for his sport.
Two years ago he screwed up his ankle during one run. Last year he crashed into a gate and messed up his left knee. And his most recent injury cost him any chance at landing a spot on the U.S.
Winter Olympic team.
 ``I
could barely stand up,'' said Miller, 26, from his training center in Steamboat Springs, Colo. That's what a chipped vertebrae that
initially knocks your spine off up to 3 inches will do. Miller, a gay professional Alpine snowboarder, sent his back into spasms during a training run a week before Olympic qualifying races Jan. 4-6.
The crash sent him flying through the air and knocked him unconscious. Amazingly, his injuries did not prevent him from competing at the snowboarding trials at Mt. Bachelor, Ore. They did, however, keep him from performing anywhere near his peak, and Miller finished a combined 21st for his two runs. Only the top three qualified for Salt Lake City.
With his Olympics chances gone, Miller is now setting his sights on making the U.S. national team this year or next, with the hopes of being an Olympian in 2006.
``Injuries like this are common,'' Miller said. ``You're going 40 to 50 miles per hour, basically on one ski … the slightest miscalculation'' can cause a crash.
Tired of Acting
Despite his travails on the slopes, Miller is a man at peace.
It's what coming out has meant to him. Miller is the only openly
elite gay snowboarder in the U.S. (``and I don't know of any who are even closeted,'' he says), having come out during the 2000-2001 season. He has known he was gay since his sophomore year in college.
During the winter of 2000-2001, Miller was part of a mixed-gender professional snowboarding team. Which meant he was eating, sleeping, training, competing and socializing with the same group of people full-time for months.
``I just got tired of putting on a straight-acting role,'' says Miller, a native of Pennsylvania. ``I would listen to [teammates'] stories and it was uncomfortable for me to make up the lies.'' Looking back, Miller has no regrets about coming out. ``It took a lot of stress off me and has made me happier.''
Miller made his declaration on a team trip to Vancouver, British Columbia, when a group of teammates invited him to join them on a trip to a local strip club. He declined, simply stating, ``I'm not into that … I'm gay.'' He received a shoulder colder than a Canadian winter from his teammates save for two women and one man. Invitations to social events dried up, the camaraderie ended and he was basically shunned.
The reaction from fellow athletes seems to go against the public perception of snowboarders as free-spirited, anything-goes types. But not all snowboarders are created equal. The extreme, radical crowd is into freestyle snowboarding, halfpipe in Olympic terminology. They are judged in their event akin to figure skaters.
Miller's discipline, in contrast, is Alpine snowboarding, which uses a longer and more narrow board and whose events ``don't give as much room for self-expression.'' In Alpine, the clock rules: whoever makes it down the hill the fastest (while navigating a series of slalom gates) wins.
``Freestylers are more likely to be more accepting of gays,'' Miller says. The Alpine side is more conservative, the equipment more expensive, with much fewer places to train.
Despite his sport's more conservative nature, Miller is very out and proud. His board boasts stickers from his sponsors:
Outboard.org (a gay and lesbian snowboarding group);
Team Philadelphia (whose pink triangle is hard to miss) and
Team Flame (an organization for gay elite athletes).
At every event, Miller fields questions from fans, organizers and athletes about the stickers and what they represent. Miller is a one-man crusader, trying to show that being gay ``is not this big, bad, dark secret.'' He describes the reaction as universally
positive and last year was asked to speak twice on diversity at the University
of Delaware.
Just Another
Athlete
His fellow snowboarders have also come around. Miller is happy with his new training team, the Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club. And where he once could see looks of astonishment from athletes ``who just realized they were beaten by a fag,'' he says, ``they now see me as just another athlete.''
An area where his sexuality has apparently been a factor is with sponsors, or rather the lack of them. Miller said he has heard ``in not so many words'' when pursuing sponsors that some companies are not eager to be associated with an openly gay snowboarder. He has struggled to raise enough money so he can live and train in Steamboat Springs during the season. The only name company he has
sponsoring him is Subaru, which assisted him with use of a car.
To make ends meet once the season ends, Miller goes back to his native Pennsylvania, where he works as project management consultant in the information technology field. He
put his use of technology to work in a personal way, with an
extensive Web
site that includes an interesting diary.
While he's not on his beloved slopes in the offseason, the tradeoff is a
much more active social life. Miller, who is single, says ``I've never had a relationship last through an entire winter.'' He attributes this to the total dedication he must give to training and competing. ``I have had to sacrifice in my relationships and a social life.''
Miller's goal is to compete in the 2006 Olympics and then possibly call it quits, ``unless my body gives out beforehand.''
Jan. 15, 2002
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