ZHANGJIAKOU, China Three years ago, pretty much exactly to the day, Max Parrot was lying in a hospital bed, getting chemo pumped into his veins to attack the Hodgkin’s lymphoma that had attacked him.
So sickened by the therapeutic poison, chronically nauseated and weak, that he couldn’t envision a future when his athlete’s body would be hale again.
“I had no more muscles, no more energy, no more cardio. I almost wanted to quit sometimes because it was so hard getting up the next morning.”
Yet there he was on Monday afternoon, wrapped in the Maple Leaf flag, grinning splitting his face as he acknowledged the accolades due a champion.
Gold medal Olympian, soaring. A silver from four years ago transformed via alchemy and remarkable persistence into precious gold.
Canada’s first gold medal of the 2022 Games, on the slopestyle snowboarding course up in the wind-whipped mountains outside Beijing. A 1-3 podium duo, in fact, with Mark McMorris earning a hard-scrabble bronze – his third consecutive bronze at his third consecutive Olympics.
“Since the last Olympics, I’ve been through so much,” Parrot, 27-year-old from Bromont, Que., told Canadian reporters in the mixed zone, after an hour of wending through interviews with international broadcast rights holders NBC and dozens of global correspondents eager to document the climax of his personal drama. “To be standing here, three years later and winning gold, that is completely crazy.”
Well, the sport is crazy, daredevil risky – just count all the broken bones and titanium bits rattling around in McMorris’ body, sore and stiffening in cold weather.
For Parrot, the cancerous assault was of a stealthier nature. He was diagnosed in December, 2018, underwent a dozen chemotherapy sessions over six months, and emerged on the other side of the trauma – physical and mental – with a clean bill of health. “Cured.”
Then promptly went out and won the Big Air competition at the X Games in Oslo. “I remember my first contest back, at the X Games in Norway. It’s imprinted in my mind. I remember turning my head before my last run and sharing a smile with the riders. All of them had been there for me at the time, so I thank them for that.”
It sounds like a movie-of-the-week, which used to be a thing. Except none of it sprang from the imagination of a hack scriptwriter. All too real for Parrot, and all that much sweeter now. Because he did n’t really have anything to provide anymore, to anybody, but he wanted to provide something to himself: Physically ravaged not that long ago, he’d risen like a phoenix from the ashes of severe illness.
“Every time I step on my snowboard, I smile twice as much as I did before and it just transplanted into my training,” Parrot explained at his following press conference.
Offered his teammate and compatriot, McMorris: “This is my third Olympic cycle with Max. He’s been through a lot, just like myself. He’s incredible. He can really nail some hard stuff. He’s definitely a great snowboarder and I’m super-proud to share the podium with him.”
Under brilliant blue noon-hour skies, the wind buffeting less than it had every week at the top of the six-feature course, temperatures surprisingly mild, Parrot was the third rider out of the gate, among three Canadians who’d qualified for the slopestyle final, Sébastien Toutant finishing ninth.
Parrot’s first ride was sharp and deft, amassing a score of 79.80. But Parrot knew he had better in him and he’d made a plan earlier in the morning of exactly how he’d strike the course, with its three jibs up top, the rails and angles, and three jumps below. For the second run – the 12 finalists each had three shots, best score counting – he changed nothing, stuck to the line he’d charted and the tricks he’d unspooled, merely honed everything, stomping a front-side 1620 on the final jump and immediately began clapping for himself, even before the whopping score of 90.96 flashed.
“It was the hardest run I’ve ever done in my entire career,” said Parrot, who has a rather cerebral approach toward his heart-clutching sport. “I had some troubles in practice this week. You know, out of the six features at least five were really challenging for me. It could have gone wrong easily but I was able to stay focused and to lay down every feature to perfection. Which got me to 90 and got me the gold medal that I was missing in my library of career contests.”
After a third ride that he basically flushed, bobbling a rail manoeuvre up top and deciding to take no risks – ditched the 1800 (five rotations) he’d tentatively blue-skied for the finale – Parrot anxiously watched the riders who succeeded him, if fairly confident his score would stand up. “I was nervous. I had the 90 and I knew that I was going to be good enough to be on the podium. But I really wanted to stay in first.”
When China’s 17-year-old phenom Su Yiming could not improve on the 88.70 of his second ride, it came down to McMorris as the only man who might overtake Parrot. And certainly McMorris – snowboarder nonpareil for more than a decade, gold at the X Games just a fortnight ago – thought he’d nailed it, with a brace of 1620s. three flawless triples, including a brace of 1620s. So stoked that he did a board flip at the bottom, a la Jose Bautista.
If… um… that iconic Bautista home run shot had turned into a ground-rule double.
“Definitely was anticipating a higher score,” McMorris, from Regina, admitted of his bronze-worthy 88.53, just .17 points behind Su’s silver. “I thought I was going to be one or two.”
Instead, a three-peat bronze.
“That’s OK. I’m happy to rise to the occasion on that run and put something really amazing down. That was the goal of that run and I did it. I don’t think anyone else has gone podium three Olympic cycles in a row. So that’s pretty special.”
McMorris was somewhat amused by Su, a one-time child actor that the Canadian first encountered as a ga-ga snowboarding fan more than 10 years ago. “I’m seeing this little kid, he’s always around. He loves snowboarding more than anything and he idolized me. I think he definitely takes notes from me.”
Then “boom.” This fall, Su made a sudden splash on the world cup circuit.
“He became a man,” said McMorris. “To be able to rise to the occasion in the host country, competing for China? It’s a lot of pressure and he did great.”
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