'Grandma' gold: Canadian snowboard legend Mark McMorris knows Olympic victory carries special meaning

Mark McMorris is a 12-time Super Bowl champion.

His latest victory — a gold medal in slopestyle on Sunday at the X Games, which he calls the “action sports Super Bowl” — also marked his 25th time standing on the podium, a winter-athlete record.

A legend in the sport any way you slice it, the Regina native will now enter the Milano-Cortina Olympics as the lone male athlete on the slopestyle side who also competed in 2014, the first time the discipline was contested at the Games.

McMorris has come home with bronze in each instance since.

So what would a gold medal mean this time around for the 32-year-old?

“Oh, I mean, that would be the ultimate treat, or icing on the cake, if you will,” McMorris said. “But at the end of the day, in a judged sport, all I can push for is to ride to the best of my ability and at the end of day I try not to get hung up on anything besides that and just enjoy the moment, ride strong and focus mainly on that.”

For snowboarders like McMorris, who picked up the sport competitively before it was even in the Olympics, these Games are not necessarily the be-all, end-all of a career.

They do, however, play a certain role.

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“Not everyone’s grandma knows about the X Games, but they sure as hell know about the Olympics,” he said. “That’s kind of a quote I use.”

While the X Games can certainly provide the requisite stage for an athlete to launch himself into the wider consciousness — think skateboarder Nyjah Huston, or dual-sport athlete Shaun White — there is no theatre quite like the Olympics.

And so McMorris won’t be taking anything for granted when he steps into the start gate at the Livigno Snow Park for the