McMorris enjoying deserved down time
Surf’s up after busy year on tour
Regina’s Mark McMorris was back on a board Wednesday, but it wasn’t his usual mode of transportation.
The 21-year-old snowboarding star is taking a break from the sport after a hectic schedule in recent months. On Wednesday, McMorris was relaxing by doing a little surfing off Oahu’s North Shore with his girlfriend, pro surfer Coco Ho.
“(Surfing) is nice on the mind,” McMorris said as he swung in a hammock between dips in the Pacific Ocean. “It’s good to do something else and get your mind off the thing you think about all the time so you don’t go crazy ...
“Over the past four years, I’ve been able to get into the surf atmosphere, so that’s been a lot of fun.”
McMorris has been on the go for the past three months.
He was in Breckenridge, Colo., for the Dew Tour Mountain Championships in mid-December. He finished fifth in the men’s slopestyle event.
In late January, he was in Aspen, Colo., for the Winter X Games. McMorris won gold medals in both the Big Air and slopestyle competitions, sweeping the events for the first time since he did it in 2012.
Then it was the European Open in Laax, Switzerland, on the first weekend of February (he finished second in slopestyle), Air+Style in Pasadena, Calif., on the third weekend of the month (he placed fourth) and the U.S. Open in Vail, Colo., last weekend (he finished second).
That helps to explain the Hawaiian holiday.
“We’ve just been chillin’,” McMorris said. “I’m tired, man. It’s been a long run.”
That said, the bronze medallist in slopestyle at the 2014 Winter Olympics said his season has been “really, really, really good.”
His silver medal in Vail gave him the World Snowboard Tour’s slopestyle title ahead of Yuki Kadono, an 18-year-old Japanese sensation who won both the Air+Style and U.S. Open competitions.
“He never was all that consistent, but he had a lot of potential and he’s starting to find his range,” McMorris said of his newest challenger. “He’s going to be standing on the podium more times than not now.
“It makes it fun, though. We had a pretty good battle (in Vail) and he definitely pushed me. But as long as I’m still stepping onto the podium, I’m a happy camper.”
McMorris said his second run in the U.S. Open was one “that had never been done before” in competition, but Kadono followed with a combination that he had never tried previously.
When Kadono landed it, he moved past McMorris into first place.
“That just goes to show what’s happening,” McMorris said. “He pushes me, I push him and that’s when the sport progresses.
“It just keeps getting better and I’m super thankful for that. I’ll keep working as hard and even harder every year.”
That’s not to say McMorris’s season is over, though. He plans to wait a couple of months before getting back into competition, but he expects to snowboard until June.
He’s also filming a movie that will take him to Australia for August and September and then he’ll go on tour in support of that film after it’s released in the fall.
That movie currently is keeping him from working on the second season of the TV show he has done with his brother, Craig, but that project also may be in the offing.
There are other things on McMorris’s plate as well — he has business interests in Canada, sponsorship responsibilities around the world and he and Craig were recently presenters (but, alas, not winners) at the recent Canadian Screen Awards — but that’s the way he likes it.
“It’s go, go, go,” McMorris said, “but it’s fun when it’s go, go, go.”