Medal sweep in the air?

Snowboarder likes Canada’s chances in 2018

Snowboarder Mark McMorris is not one to play shy when it comes to the notion of a Canadian medal sweep in the new Olympic discipline of big air at the 2018 Winter Games.

“There’s a very strong chance,” McMorris boldly told Postmedia this week from California. “We are an insanely dominating nation.”

The numbers show McMorris is not exaggerating. At least five Canadian male riders are legitimate podium contenders for the Olympic debut of what promises to be a ratings star at the latest instalment of the five-ring circus.

Canada won just two snowboard medals at the 2014 Sochi Games, but McMorris can envision gold, silver and bronze for both men’s big air and slopestyle come 2018 in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

“If you’re going to do good in one event,” McMorris reasons, “you’ll probably do good in the other.”

A proud Regina product, McMorris, 22, partially credits Canada’s never-ending winters for this country’s snowboarding success on the world stage.

He won gold last Saturday in the Olympic test event for big air in Pyeongchang with 184.75 points. His compatriot Max Parrot, of Bromont, Que. seized silver with 178 points.

Tyler Nicholson, of North Bay, Ont., finished just off the podium in fourth place (171 points). Montreal’s Sebastien Toutant nailed the highest score at the test event on a single run (97) but fell on his other two attempts and settled for seventh. Rising star Darcy Sharpe, of Comox, B.C., placed 10th.

For some of the newcomers in the mix, the Mark McMorris effect is clearly in play as they grew up pretending to snowboard like their Canadian cult hero.

Shaun White, also known as the flying tomato, will go down as the American pioneer who led the charge to turn the sport mainstream. But the headlines and the podiums belong these days to a new generation led by the rider nicknamed “McLovin.”

“A lot of the kids on the national team were pretty young when I started,” says McMorris, who won bronze in slopestyle at the 2014 Sochi Games in spite of riding with a broken rib. “They’ll tell me they would sit in school watching my website when I was posting videos and stuff. “And that’s pretty insane.” Insanity is nothing out of the ordinary in big air, which requires riders to launch off a massive jump and turn tricks before (hopefully) touching down in one piece.

Most also compete in the Olympic discipline of slopestyle in which riders rip over three sets of rails and four jumps, throwing tricks over each one.

McMorris might be the biggest name in the sport, but Parrot is the reigning X Games champion in big air and a legitimate gold-medal threat for Pyeongchang.

Just last month, Parrot became the first man in the world to nail the coveted double backside rodeo — a move that could prove invaluable on the Olympic stage.

“I’m still not ready to do that trick in competition, because it’s not 100 per cent yet,” Parrot says. “I’m still working on it, and hopefully I have better confidence in it and put it down in competition in the future.”

In spite of his sparkling resume, McMorris had no idea what the future held after he broke his femur last Feb. 21 under the lights at Shaun White’s Air+Style competition in downtown Los Angeles. His leg snapped on a bumpy landing hill after nailing three off-axis flips with four rotations in a trick called a frontside triple cork 1440 mute

For the first time in nine months, McMorris successfully landed the same manoeuvre to win gold in Saturday’s Olympic test event.

“I think those demons that I conquered have been living inside me for the last eight or nine months,” he says. “Stuff goes through your head … ‘Will I come back? Will I still be able to win events and do the tricks that I once did?’ ”

McMorris is a reality-TV star and the face of his own video game called Mark McMorris Infinite Air. But perhaps the most riveting drama is expected to unfold on the hill in the next 14 months as the Canadian men battle for just four Olympic berths in South Korea.