Mark McMorris’s Olympic medal beef with Max Parrot has been put to pasture. Now, bring on big air

Opinion

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This article was published 12/02/2022 (1307 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BEIJING Mark vs. Max.

This is not a good look, dudes. I’d call it a bonk — Mark McMorris smacking Max Parrot upside the head with his snowboard.

Canadian on Canadian at the Olympics. Bronze medallist shredding gold medallist, the country’s only gold medallist to this point.

Out of 84 nations competing at the 2022 Winter Games, stereotypically polite hosers from north of the 49th parallel would probably be the last mooks you’d expect to get into a medal squabble.

Did we mention the part about Parrot copping his gold in snowboarding slopestyle just three years after beating cancer? Emerging from the other side of a dozen debilitating chemo sessions for Hodgkin’s lymphoma? The man is just about slag-proof.

McMorris, master of the snowboarding universe, is the unfailingly courteous and always engaging rider from the flatlands of Saskatchewan.

And now, Parrot has disclosed, McMorris is sorry. It’s the default Canadian position.

There are no bad guys here and certainly no cheats, which is more than can be said of doping Russian figure skaters. But both men had landed in a heap o’ controversy over what video review — which the judges never saw, never requested — rather clearly shows was a flub by Parrot in his winning run down the challenging six-feature course up in the mountains of Zhangjiakou on Monday. He failed to grab his board and hold it during a hairy manoeuvre, clutching his knees instead, all of which happened in under three seconds in a mid-air spin.

Parrot has not denied this.

“Everyone that knows snowboard knows I missed that grab,” the 29-year-old from Bromont, Que., told CBC Sports the other day. “I’m not hiding from that. It is what it is.”

He does, however, maintain that he did grab hold of the board fleetingly, before his hand slid off and ended up on his knee.

Nine judges eyeballed the trick — a 1620, 4 1/2 rotations while flipping off-axis three times — with two of the judges specifically assigned to the jumps. Nobody spotted the botch. Snowboard cognoscenti did, though, and flooded social media with vitriol about the dumb-ass judging panel.

One might think it’s all a fart in a mitten. But grabs matter, especially to snowboarding purists who are passionately of the opinion that styling trumps technique, which is basically the continental divide in a sport that is not so long removed from its iconoclastic backcountry roots. It doesn’t come to heel easily and it doesn’t much trust judges who are allegedly far behind the progression curve.

Missing a grab would be akin, they argue, to a figure skater falling on a jump and still managing to win the event with only a one-point deduction. They don’t want to be figure skaters.

Parrot’s second ride scored 90.86, nearly two points clear of 17-year-old Chinese sensation Su Yuming, who just happens to be an adoring fanboy of McMorris, upon whom he’s obviously patterned his snowboard mojo. The Su camp, it should be noted, had nothing to say about this tiff, staying well out of bickering range.

McMorris, however, had belatedly got his knickers in a knot. Maybe a bitty knot, media-magnified, but the 28-year-old is plenty media savvy, so it’s doubtful he unintentionally put his booted foot in his mouth, asserting to the CBC: “I had the run of the day.”

That was, more or less, what he’d told reporters in the mixed zone on the day, if couched a little more obliquely. Clearly taken aback by his third place on the merits of a brilliant third run that scored 88.53, to Su’s 88.70. “Definitely was anticipating a high score. Sometimes when you finish a run, you don’t really recall some of the maybe little bobbles that you had. I’m interested to watch it back because I thought I was going to be one or two.”

McMorris must have had a gander by the time CBC caught up with him later.

“Obviously it would have been nice to have a different shade of medal,” he admitted, sounding not too thrilled about his third slopestyle bronze at consecutive Games. “But knowing that I kind of had the run of the day and one of the best rides of my life and the whole industry knows what happened … pretty, pretty crazy.”

Parrot defended his gold as the superior ride, all in all.

“I admire Mark, I admire Su. I think, in the end, the only difference is they had multiple small mistakes and I only had one, which was definitely bigger, I agree. But in the end, it’s a judged sport and the fact is I had the best technical run of the day on pretty much every feature. And, no, it wasn’t perfect, and I think that’s why I didn’t score 100 either.”

Major amplitude, no hands down, jumps landed perfectly, no edges, very clean, Parrot pointed out. Gold-worthy.

Iztok Sumatic, the head judge for snowboarding in Beijing, explained the cock-up thusly in an interview with the Whitelines website: “We had this camera angle that they gave us and it looked clean. It wasn’t just us. There were coaches we spoke to after who said, ‘Hey, when we saw that we were like, bam, this is an insane run.’ We judged what we saw and everyone felt confident with it.”

McMorris described the feed judges saw as “garbage.”

Upon further review, Sumatic conceded they’d got it wrong and probably judges would have given a lower score had they realized the grab was an optical illusion. But still. “All I can say, in Max’s defence, regarding this specific run, is that it was still quite an insane run. He killed it, especially on the rails.”

The attaché for Canada’s snowboarding squad told the Star on Saturday that neither Parrot nor McMorris would be available for an interview.

Here’s the thing: The result won’t be changed. Nobody has filed a formal appeal. And, while McMorris may have a genuine grievance, may even have the support of the snowboarding community, the wider public might find the war of words between teammates distasteful. While forthrightness among athletes is a rare quality, McMorris was running the risk of being viewed as brattish and whinge-y.

My guess is the amiable McMorris realizes that now.

Parrot, who spoke to The Associated Press Saturday, disclosed that McMorris had offered an apology for essentially suggesting that his compatriot had only won gold because of questionable Olympic judging.

“He actually came to me earlier today and he apologized for his non-sportsmanship,” Parrot said. “I told him no worries.”

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McMorris doubled down and eventually went public with his mea cupla.

“I let my emotions get the better of me in the days following slopestyle and I want to sincerely apologize to Max,” he wrote. “I’m amazed by what you’ve overcome and I’m extremely proud to have shared the podium with you. Let’s get another one for @TeamCanada.”

Magnanimous. Maybe burying the hatchet only skin-deep, though.

If there is a lingering grudge, take it outside, boys. On Monday, in the big air competition, when the Canadians will go mano a mano and board to board again.

Rosie DiManno is a Toronto-based columnist covering sports and current affairs for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @rdimanno