Canada’s Mr Bronze Mark McMorris: "If you get knocked down, get back up"

Mark McMorris let out a howl at the end of the Beijing 2022 men’s slopestyle finals. It was, at once, funny and grateful – but with a pinch of frustration around the edges too.

“Another one!?” 

It was a third Olympic bronze for the 28-year-old Canadian rider, a fixture on the world circuit for a full decade and a man who no one – not one single person involved in the sport of snowboarding – has an unkind word for.

“Yup, I did shout that,” he told Olympics.com after the slopestyle competition ended with his Canadian teammate Max Parrot atop the podium. “but I'm extremely proud and honoured to be playing that role [three-time bronze winner], to have that sort of consistency and longevity in what people say is a young-man's sport.”

This kind of perspective and gratitude, has come to McMorris – a ten-time X Games champion – the hard way. Not only is he lucky to be winning medals of any colour, he’s lucky just to be here drawing breath and enjoying his sport and the way it allows him to feel: “the connection with Mother Earth and with nature…and moving in the elements.”

It’s part of the hard-knock lore of snowboarding that, eleven months before he won the second of his Olympic bronzes (his first came in Sochi in 2014 when he soldiered on with a broken rib) he suffered the kind of injuries most don’t walk away from. Riding with friends and his brother, Craig, in the Whistler backcountry, McMorris misjudged a take-off and hit a tree.

He was left with a shattered jaw, pelvic and rib fractures too. His spleen was punctured and one of his lungs had collapsed. He was pretty sure he was going to die en route, via emergency helicopter, to hospital in Vancouver.

“There’s still growing pains and with a lot of internal damage, it's a