Canada’s golden Parrot loves to soar
A long, sticky summer of cutting lawns continues to pay dividends for Max Parrot.
As a nine-year-old, Parrot launched an unsuccessful campaign to convince his parents to buy him a snowboard.
“My parents were taking care of me,” Parrot says. “They just thought snowboarding was too dangerous.”
Undeterred, young Max channelled his inner entrepreneur and went doorto-door with his mower to raise the requisite funds. Still buoyed by that initial investment, Parrot, 21, touched down in his hometown of Bromont Monday as the X Games champion in big air snowboarding.
The new sky-scraping Olympic discipline — targeted at the smartphone generation — involves snowboarding down a steep pitch and launching off a massive jump.
Last Friday, Parrot landed the first contest switch triple cork 1800 to claim gold on Buttermilk Mountain in Aspen, Colo. Regina’s Mark McMorris won silver (and then gold Saturday in snowboard slopestyle).
The snowboarding triumphs punctuated a dominant Canadian showing at the 2016 edition of the Super Bowl of action support. Canadian athletes won nine medals, including gold medals by Parrot, McMorris, Spencer O’Brien (women’s ski slopestyle), Brady Leman (men’s ski cross), and Kelsey Serwa (women’s ski cross).
A star of his own MTV reality show and big-screen movie, McMorris is the public face of snowboarding.
But Parrot, who finished fifth in slopestyle at the Sochi Olympics, is one of Canada’s most dominant winter athletes in his own right.
The five-time X Games champion harbours no ill will toward McMorris.
He simply hopes his performance will vault him into the same stratosphere heading into the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
“The attention Mark gets, I think he deserves it,” Parrot says.
“He has really crushed all the contests in the last couple of years, and still today he’s the X Games gold medallist in slopestyle.
“For sure, I’m trying to get there.
“I’m working really hard.
Hopefully, I get even more podiums and keep battling Mark for his medals.”