Life, death and podium dreams
McMORRIS BACK FROM BRINK IN TIME FOR GAMES
It was about 11 months ago that Mark McMorris was snowboarding in the Whistler backcountry and made a mistake that left him in the trees.
Maybe not trees, plural, actually.
“It was just one big tree,” he says. McMorris hit that tree at high speed and in mid-air. The collision “pretty much broke everything on my left side,” McMorris says.
The 24- year- old from Regina was no stranger to injury. He broke a rib in a fall just before the Sochi Games and managed a medal in the slopestyle event. He broke his femur two years later at an event in California. But the accident last year was something else entirely. It caused life- threatening destruction — the actual count of broken bones was 17 — and required multiple surgeries. There were months of recovery where he wasn’t sure if a return to competition was still the goal.
“There’s a lot of self-doubt, sort of,” he says. “Just, like, do I really want to be doing this anymore?”
“But I don’t have anything else that brings this kind of joy to my life. Obviously it’s really stressful and it can be tough at times, but I’m happy that I pushed through everything and I’m back here.”
McMorris would be an intriguing story on his own; there are only so many athletes who can say they skirted death and then qualified for the Olympics within a 12-month span. But McMorris isn’t just competing in South Korea, he’s a serious medal contender and part of a Canadian team that hopes to win a pile of them in the snowboard events.
Teammate Max Parrot, who just won a gold at the X Games, is a double- medal threat in slopestyle and big air like McMorris. And with Sebastien Toutant and Tyler Nicholson rounding out the team, there is an outside shot Canada could sweep one of the podiums.
The snowboarders begin their practice runs at Phoenix Snow Park Wednesday, having walked the course for the first time Tuesday.
Nicholson declared the course “pretty sick” — which would be “good” — and Parrot said it should make for good television with its dramatic rails, meaning the tricks will be performed at a good height. There are a string of laconic compliments uttered at the snowboard news conference, which makes sense because, you know, snowboard.
At one point Toutant is asked about the team’s recent training camp in Hawaii and he notes, correctly it must be said, that Hawaii is “a really nice place.”
But while McMorris is mostly just as casual as his teammates, he does take the odd serious turn that befits his past year. Asked about the photo of him in a hospital bed, all braces and pins and plaster casts, McMorris says he still sees it on social media.
“We live in a pretty wellconnected world, so I hear about that a lot,” he says.
Many of those posts and comments were from people who have suffered serious accidents and who tell him that they take something positive out of his recovery.
“That’s pretty motivating for me, too,” McMorris says.
“It makes me want to push through and be the best I can be to help people through tough times or whatever. That’s a pretty cool feeling.”
Drawing on t hat also helped in those moments when the recovery didn’t feel like it was moving fast enough. When McMorris first starting riding again at the start of this season, it “just wasn’t that great,” he says.
He points to his left arm: “This bone shattered and it takes a really long time to heal.” Fair enough. But by October, at an event in Switzerland, “it felt like I had never left, so that was cool.”
It was then, j ust four months ago, that McMorris says he first felt confident that he could compete at a high enough level to make the Pyeongchang team.
“I’m just glad to be doing this again,” he says.
“Whatever the outcome, it’s a pretty good feeling to be able to snowboard again.”
You get the sense that McMorris is a little of two minds about the accident. He’s not totally forthcoming about what happened and probably passed the point long ago where he got tired of recounting the grisly details.
“It sucks, but I’m trying to move on from that,” he said Tuesday. “And here I am.”
But he also knows that it’s part of his story now. He will always be the guy whose road to Pyeongchang went straight into a tree and detoured to an emergency room and an operating table and a hospital bed.
“It’s pretty motivating,” he says, “knowing I was almost dead and I get to be here again.”