REGINA'S MARK MCMORRIS NO STRANGER TO ADVERSITY
Snowboarder keeps positive attitude ahead of semifinal
KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia — Learning to snowboard at Mission Ridge, a bump of a ski hill roughly an hour east of Regina, a young Mark McMorris routinely clamoured to his feet, dusted off his snow pants and went back to shredding what amounts to a mountain in Saskatchewan.
The 20-year-old must rebound in similar fashion for a chance at realizing what must now feel like a distant dream at the Sochi Olympics.
“It’s all good,” McMorris said. He was answering a reporter’s question but, in reality, he was also giving himself a pep talk after failing to advance directly to the snowboard slopestyle final.
“It’s behind us now. You just have to look positively toward the future and the positive fact is that I have another shot on Saturday.”
In a display of mighty pluck, McMorris attacked the rails and soared off the jumps Thursday — this after breaking a rib just 12 days prior at the Winter X Games.
“Here comes Canada’s Mark McMorris,” the announcer told a sparse proRussia crowd gathered at the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park to witness history-in-the-making at the first slopestyle event of the Olympics. “Did you know he comes from Regina, a city with no hills?”
At the bottom of the hill, on the day he was supposed to show off his wares as the best slopestyle snowboarder on the planet, McMorris looked every bit the picture of a dejected athlete.
Shoulders slumped. Eyes cast downward. Fingers nervously fidgeting with the Velcro straps on the sleeves of his snow white ski jacket.
“It’s a shock to the heart,” he said softly, trying to digest the sequence of events that left his Olympic dreams teetering on the proverbial mountain ledge.
McMorris wiped out on his first run in Thursday’s qualifying round for a forgettable score of 29.50. He shook his head in disgust and leaned back to stretch out his rib cage before giving it another go.
On the second run, McMorris looked much stronger, staying on his feet and nailing a triple-cork on the final jump.
The judges, however, were not all that impressed, awarding McMorris a score of 89.25 points, good for seventh place in his grouping.
“It’s pretty ridiculous,” McMorris said of the judging. “But what can you do?”
Only the top four in each heat advance, so McMorris is down to his last life in Saturday’s semifinal. The task is daunting, with 21 riders competing for the four remaining spots in the final. Daunting, but doable. “To overcome an injury like that is amazing, the strength of his head and his mental game, his character shows right through by dealing with this injury,” freestyle head coach Leo Addington said. “It’s really a sign of a great athlete to be able to do that.”
“To come from a crash a few weeks ago to putting that run down is unbelievable. In any other situation, it would be an incredible success.”
McMorris, a rising cult figure in the sport, shrugged when asked about snowboarding with a broken rib.
“You feel it,” he said. “It’s still broken, so there’s pain, but nothing you can’t manage. I didn’t feel it that whole run until that last hard impact. But even then, it’s not like I’m going to fall over … It’s like, ‘Wow, that sucks.’ But right now, that’s the least of my worries.”
In Addington’s mind, McMorris need not worry. He simply need dust himself off, much like he did as a sprite at Mission Ridge.
“A minute of disappointment and then right back onto refocusing, what to do next,” Addington said. “He’ll be right back on it for sure.”
The semis, after all, lead to the finals, which lead to the podium. The route is not direct, but the destination remains the same.
“It’s not as ideal as going straight to finals, but it (means) more course time. He gets to ride the jumps more and see the conditions,” Addington said. “If he does well, he rolls through motivated. It’s a double-edged sword, for sure. It could be positive, as well.”