PARK CITY, Utah – Bode Miller was a speck in the rear-view mirror.

Coming within a snowflake of wiping out on the first leg of the Alpine combined, Miller, the madman of U.S. downhill skiing, was in 15th place going into the final two slalom runs. That’s when the speck started getting larger, like the headlights on 18-wheeler that’s closing ground. He went from 15th to fifth after his first slalom run.

That’s when the speck turned into a silver streak.

Legs and hips gyrating from side to side, Miller did an electric slide on snow. He went from near obscurity to a silver medal in one minute and 36.61 seconds.

It was the fastest slalom run of the day and left the crowd at the Snowbasin Ski Area chanting, “Bo-Dee! Bo-Dee! Bo-Dee!”

“It’s like he scored six touchdowns in the fourth quarter,” exclaimed Bill Marolt, the head of U.S. skiing.

Miller, the world’s fastest slalom skier who’s favored to win the slalom and giant slalom, entered this combined downhill-slalom event thinking he might garner an extra medal. But when his left knee and hip scraped the snow on his downhill run, the crowd gasped.

“I was headed right toward the coaches,” said Miller.

He was headed toward disaster. But Alpine skiing’s most unconventional, unpredictable, and unbelievable talent had two runs to climb back into contention. Probably no one else in the world could have pulled it off.

“We all knew Bode was pretty quick,” said Great Britain’s Ross Green. “But that was phenomenal.”

That’s one way to describe the New Hampshire flash.

He doesn’t have a high school diploma because he refused to rewrite a final paper needing just one more point to graduate. And he doesn’t ski like anyone else because he’d rather do the unfathomable than the conventional.

The Europeans have studied his Miller’s unorthodox form – he sits back on his skis, his hands hang at his sides, his poles dangle – and concluded they don’t have a clue as to how Miller does it. He flies where others fall.

“They [told] Jean Claude-Kiely, ‘You’re too wild,'” Marolt said, referring to the legendary French skier. “But these guys know what to do to get to the finish line.”

Miller knew what he had to do on the last run. When asked how he’d approach it, he said, “Full gas.”

There were four more skiers who had a chance to get to the finish line, and then the medal’s podium, before Miller. As each finished with a time that did not surpass Miller, the crowd roared.

“Bo-Dee! Bo-Dee! Bo-Dee!”

Only Norway’s Andre Kjetil Aamodt, who had a lead of two minutes and 44 seconds over Miller before the final run, was able to hold off the silver streak. Aamodt won by a scant .28 of a second.

“That’s everything I had today,” said Miller. “That’s all.”