DOUBLE CORKER
Canadian Parrot soars to silver, McMorris bronze in slopestyle showdown for Canada’s first medals
PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA— Mark McMorris is known for rising to the occasion — whether that’s coming back from horrific injuries or landing the best run when it counts most.
But in an incredible slopestyle snowboarding final, that magic wasn’t quite enough and he found himself with Olympic bronze, again. Teammate Max Parrot was the one who was able to bring his best on his final run, pulling himself from the back of the pack all the way to Olympic silver.
American Redmond Gerard, the youngest man in the field, took the gold.
North Bay’s Tyler Nicholson, 22, finished seventh while Sebastien Toutant, 25, from L’Assomption, Que. was 11th.
With a full third of the 12-man final wearing a Canadian uniform it looked certain to be a good day for Canada in this event.
The International Olympic Committee has been opening the door to more and more of these freestyle action sports in an effort to draw new and younger audiences to the Games, and it’s easy to see why slopestyle has become one of the most popular events.
Snowboarders perform incredible feats of athleticism — flipping three times while spinning four times off the jumps, and sliding along rails like skateboarders in a city park — all the while making it look like they’re genuinely having fun. They watch and even cheer for each other’s runs.
But, as much as they talk in breezy tones about being stoked to be here riding such a sick course at the Olympics, this is a demanding sport and injuries are all too common. The road to the Olympics for most of Canada’s slopestyle riders went through doctors and surgeons.
In 2016, McMorris broke his femur in a competition accident and then, after six months in rehab, worked his way back to the top of his sport. In 2017, he crashed into a tree while snowboarding in the backcountry, broke much of what there is to break in the human body and had to rehab all over again.
Toutant compressed a disk in his back months ago and was only able to return to riding a few weeks ago, and Nicholson tore his ACL last spring.
Only the 23-year-old Parrot of Bromont, Que., arrived here without a recent injury and was riding a high from an increasing number of big wins in the last two years, making a name for himself alongside the 24-year-old McMorris.
All the riders in the 12-man final wanted to win an Olympic medal, but they all wanted something else, too: a chance to showcase their sport at its best. And that’s something they all left with.
“Last time (at the 2014 Olympics) there were three massive jumps and the rails were kind of average, but here it’s a rail plaza of every option that is thinkable,” said Norway’s Staale Sandbech, who won silver in the Olympic debut of slopestyle in Sochi.
“You’ve got to be a complete snowboarder to win here, for sure.”
Coming into the last Olympics, the riders wanted jumps big enough to showcase triple flips, which were the cutting edge of competition then.
But now that riders have found themselves in a seemingly never-ending cycle of adding more and more twists to those triples, looking for an edge, riders have started to bemoan the “spin-to-win” mentality and demand more creative course design, to give them more scope to demonstrate style and unique tricks. That’s what they got here. And while the jumps are still the wow factor for the crowds gathered at the bottom of the hill, a new judging system now in use means each element — three rails and three jumps — is worth the same.
That means what a rider did on the first rail here was just as important to winning — or losing — as that final big jump.