AIR OF SUCCESS
Canadian snowboarders McMorris, Parrot take very different flight paths to the top
“Oh my god, we couldn’t be more different. Show personality, live the sport.” MARK MCMORRIS
BUTTERMILK MOUNTAIN, COLO.— On any given day at a snowboard competition, Mark McMorris and Max Parrot can find themselves on the podium and it’s anybody’s guess who will be on the top step.
The two Canadians in their early 20s are separated by six months in age and half a country — McMorris hails from the flatlands of Saskatchewan, Parrot is from Quebec — and they’re both solid bets for gold medals in next month’s Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
This week at the X Games, an event considered almost as important, marks their final showdown against the world’s best and each other.
They’ve both made history here before landing new tricks, and achieved the rare double of winning gold in slopestyle and big air. McMorris has the most Aspen X Games gold medals, but Parrot has the most recent one, earned last year in big air.
But their penchant for winning is where the similarities end. As riders, they couldn’t be more different, nor could their routes to their second Winter Olympics.
For McMorris, it’s been the life of a wellconnected professional snowboarder, attending industry events and filming in the backcountry — and with that, unfortunately, the need to come back from a devastating injury after he broke much of what there is to break in the human body by crashing into a tree last March.
For Parrot, it’s been steady effort and repetition, using trampolines and an airbag facility to put in as much time on new tricks as he can, and pulling back on all the other elements of snowboarding that don’t directly relate to winning an Olympic medal.
“They definitely approach the whole idea of snowboarding differently,” said Canada’s slopestyle coach Chris Wit- wicki.
“Mark is looking at (competitive snowboarding) as more of a stepping stone in his snowboarding career. He’s got a pretty solid plan of what he’s going to do after it. He’ll probably go free-riding and accomplish more in the snowboarding culture side of things,” Witwicki said.
“Max is focused on being a competitive snowboarder. That’s where his focus is and that works for him. It’s not to say one is right or one is wrong. That’s just how it is.”
Slopestyle snowboarding is a tough master.
Not just with its potential for hard crashes — when the incredible tricks they perform aren’t quite landed — but in riding the line between snowboard culture, which demands an effortless cool, and the high-performance training an athlete needs in order to win.
Inclusion of slopestyle in the 2014 Olympics and the related big air event, a single trick competition, in the 2018 Games has made that balance even harder to find by dramatically increasing the level of competition and difficulty of the tricks.
McMorris, with his easy smile and engaging personality, has found a way to win regularly and stay connected to snowboard’s core culture.
It’s McMorris, not Parrot, who was invited to the X Games opening press event along with eight other global freestyle stars, and he’s also the one featured in snowboard magazines. Parrot is well aware that there’s a side of snowboarding that doesn’t love his competition-first approach.
“It’s all about fun,” the Bromont, Que., rider said of his sport’s deeply rooted culture.
And while he finds joy in training — whether that’s practising flips and spins on a trampoline and dry slope into a cushioned airbag, or practising on the rail in his backyard — he knows that’s not what gets attention in magazines or on social media. “It’s more about people that film and do video parts — it’s like two completely different worlds,” Parrot said.
“There are a lot of snowboarders that do both. They compete and they do movies . . . but every day that I film is a day that I miss of training, and now the contest level is really high and it’s hard to do both,” he said just before the season began.
“I just left it behind. I’ll go back to it one day, when I have time I do it, but not this year. It’s the Olympics and I’m just focusing on that.”
For McMorris, the two pieces — core snowboard culture and competition — go hand in hand and can’t be separated.
“Oh my god, we couldn’t be more different,” McMorris said recently at the opening of Burton’s flagship store in Toronto. “Show personality, live the sport.”
Regina’s McMorris may only be six months older than Parrot, but he comes at things with an older-school thinking steeped in snowboard culture.
That places a premium on backcountry filming and landing tricks on snow rather than a competition on- ly-focus and utilizing new tools to practise more safely.
“Canada is going to see a couple different athletes and I’m hopefully going to land my run when it matters and (win) a couple medals, trying to keep snowboarding in the right eye,” said McMorris, who won a bronze medal in Sochi.
Before that happens, Canada’s two best will go head to head here Friday night in the big air competition. And showing just how deep Canadians are in this new Olympic event, they’ll face two other teammates — Darcy Sharpe and Sebastien Toutant — which means the eight-man final will be 50 per cent Canadian.
On Saturday, McMorris and Sharpe will also compete in slopestyle. As an X Games bronze medallist in slopestyle last year, Morris was pre-qualified for the final while Sharpe — who just missed making Canada’s Olympic team — was the only Canadian able to nab one of the final spots during Thursday’s qualifying session.
During the Olympics, Canadians cheer for Canadian athletes in any sport, whether they normally follow it or not. That, to some degree, makes McMorris, Parrot and their teammates interchangeable once they land in South Korea.
But here, in the final event before February’s Games, they’re all individuals with different styles, fans and views about what makes their sport great.