Breaks go the way of McMorris
PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA— When Jake Burton Carpenter, the father of modern snowboarding, saw Mark McMorris after his most recent mishap — crashing into a tree and nearly killing himself — he had just one thought.
“I was like ‘what the f--- are you doing riding in the goddamn backcountry when you’re going to win an Olympic gold medal and be a superstar?’ ”
McMorris responded, grabbing the man whose Burton Snowboards company has long sponsored him by the shirt collar: “I’ll snowboard when I want to snowboard,” Carpenter said, smiling as he retold the story in Toronto in the lead-up to these Games.
“It was cool. It was a defining moment in my understanding of the sport, the thing that most recently reminded me what it’s about.”
McMorris, the 24-year-old mountain-loving rider from the flatlands of Saskatchewan, hasn’t made getting to the 2018 Olympics easy for himself and he’s made choices that would be hard to fath- om in more traditional sports. In doing so, he’s keeping alive the image that snowboarders are a different breed of athlete, even at a time when the sport’s growing demands have filled its participants’ days with visits to the gym, nutritionists and sport psychologists.
“You’re watching world-class athletes risking life and limb but the vibe is still there and I think that gets the best out of them when they’re having fun,” Carpenter said.
In McMorris’s case, fun — snowboarding in all its forms — has also led to an incredible laundry list of injuries. Since the 2014 Sochi Olympics — where he won slopestyle bronze despite a freshly-broken rib — he has spent an entire year of his life in intensive rehabilitation because of two different snowboarding accidents.
“I made a huge mistake and hit a frickin’ tree. I’m not scared of that happening again . . . That was a once-ina-lifetime thing.”
MARK MCMORRIS ON A CRASH THAT LEFT HIM IN INTENSIVE CARE
The first one threatened his career; the second one threatened his life.
In February 2016, he snapped his right femur — the largest and strongest bone in the human body — when he landed badly in a big air competition in Los Angeles.
He came back from that faster than anyone could have imagined and, after producing one of his strongest competitive seasons ever, secured his early qualification for the Pyeongchang Olympics, where he will compete in slopestyle this weekend and the new Olympic big air event in two weeks
In March 2017, just days before Canada Snowboard made that Olympic team announcement, McMorris went to the Whistler, B.C., backcountry and built a jump to film with friends.
He wasn’t doing anything hard like the triple corks (three flips while spinning four times) that he’ll throw down in competition here, but he came off the jump too far to the left and sailed right into a tree.
He was airlifted to the hospital; needed multiple surgeries to repair a fractured jaw, shattered arm, ruptured spleen, fractured pelvis, broken ribs and a collapsed lung; and spent days in intensive care.
For many athletes, that would be a sign to hang up their board and find another way to make a living. Not for McMorris.
“Obviously, I love this sport more than anything. Nothing really brings me the same joy as snowboarding. If you’re given the opportunity to return to full health you might as well give it a go.”
To him these accidents aren’t part of a pattern, just unfortunate, random occurrences.
The broken leg? “It was the biggest freak accident ever,” he said, “like one in a million that that could happen again.”
The backcountry crash? “I made a huge mistake and hit a frickin’ tree. I’m not scared of that happening again . . . That was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. It’s like getting in a car crash or something, it was just not meant to happen.”
But, still, those injuries have left marks, both physical and emotional ones.
McMorris says he now feels even more thankful to be able to do what he loves and wants to win even more than he did before.
It’s hard to imagine how that’s even possible.
McMorris was so driven from a young age that he managed to convince his parents, a nurse and a provincial politician, to let him quit school as a teenager to pursue the life of a professional snowboarder.
And his desire to win is so great that a year ago he tried a risky quadruple cork — a full flip more than he’d ever even practised — in a competition because that was his only shot at winning.
“I don’t like not winning, you know,” he said at the time.
That hasn’t changed a bit, as was evidenced at the Aspen X Games two weeks ago where he just missed landing a slopestyle run that he thought could win the event and was left with a bronze medal.
“People said, ‘It’s all good, look what you’ve been through,’ but when you feel good it’s hard to feel like that … there’s no reason not to do my best,” McMorris said.
“I pushed through everything and I’m back.”
And here on the biggest of stages looking for the only thing still missing from his competitive career: Olympic gold.