McMORRIS FACES UPHILL CLIMB
Snowboarder badly injured in fall
By his legions of fans all over the globe, snowboarder Mark McMorris is considered a reallife superhero both on and off the mountain.
But on Saturday, the Olympic bronze medallist proved he is, in fact, human, crashing from unknown heights while snowboarding with his brother and some friends in the backcountry near Whistler, B.C. McMorris suffered a fractured jaw, fractured left arm, ruptured spleen, a stable pelvic fracture, rib fractures and a collapsed left lung in the fall. Medics airlifted him Saturday to Vancouver General Hospital, where he underwent surgery to stem internal bleeding from his spleen.
On Sunday evening, McMorris returned to the operating room for a second surgery to repair his jaw and arm fracture.
“While both the mandible and humerus fractures were complicated injuries, the surgeries went very well and both fractures are now stabilized to heal in excellent position,” Dr. Rodney French, the team physician for Canada Snowboard, said in a news release. “It is too early to speculate on a timeline for Mark’s recovery.”
The 23-year-old Regina native was recovering Monday in the intensive care unit. Craig McMorris told the CBC his younger brother was unable to talk or move and wrote out simple messages to his family by pen. “He was in the most amount of pain that I’ve ever seen in a human being,” Craig told CBC’s Chris Brown.
Craig, 25, is a professional snowboarder who worked as a special analyst for CBC at the 2016 Rio Summer Games. The brothers routinely snowboard in backcountry locations all over the world with video cameras on hand to capture their skyscraping tricks.
“Obviously, snowboarding is an extreme sport and backcountry is definitely something that would be in the scope of what Mark and many other snowboarders would do,” Snowboard Canada spokesman Eric Escaravage said. “Basically, they head into a non-ski resort setting, whether it be by helicopter or by hiking up, and certain snowboarders will build jumps in the backcountry. They obviously take a lot of safety precautions.”
The McMorris brothers used snowmobiles Saturday to reach the site where Mark crashed.
“Unfortunately it was a bit of flat light and he misjudged his takeoff,” Escaravage said. “And that resulted in the accident.”
McMorris, a six-time Winter X Games champion, just completed a remarkable comeback season after breaking his right femur in February 2016 at Shaun White’s Air+Style competition in Los Angeles. The day after that injury, he underwent surgery to insert a medal rod in the bone that runs from the hip to the knee.