Skip to main content

Canadian snowboarder Mark McMorris celebrates after winning bronze in the slopestyle event and Canada's first medal of the Sochi Winter Olympic games at the Rosa Khutor Exterme Park February 8, 2014.John Lehmann/The Globe and Mail

It's midday on Halloween, and Mark McMorris is considering his costume. He's in a Vancouver hotel room with a friend from boyhood who has dropped by. McMorris, the snowboarding star from Regina, is in town for the screening of a new Oakley movie in which he co-stars.

His first Halloween idea is to go as a soccer player – more athletic performance art than static costume. "Just whenever anybody bumps into you," McMorris explains to his buddy, then trips himself and flops to the floor. Laughs all around.

He leans instead toward something less conceptual. Suspenders, white dress shirt, socks pulled up high, a taped-up pair of Oakley Frogskins. "Classic nerd," he says. "It's so easy."

That easygoing personality caught wider attention outside the small world of snowboarding last February at the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics. But McMorris is a serious star of snowboard slopestyle, an event in its Olympic debut that was staged on the first full day of competition. He was a favourite to win gold until he broke a rib in a fall several weeks earlier at the X Games; despite the injury, he rallied dramatically to win a bronze medal in Sochi.

This week, he leads a contingent of 22 Canadian snowboarders and skiers to the Winter X Games, a four-day festival that begins Thursday in Aspen, Colo. The 21-year-old is the most prominent among the group, but many of his teammates have accomplished much in the new Olympic sports of slopestyle and halfpipe, which have long been mainstays of X Games.

Dara Howell brings her Sochi gold in ski slopestyle to Aspen. Mike Riddle won Sochi silver in the ski halfpipe. And in McMorris's snowboard slopestyle, Canadians have won gold in the past four X Games: Maxence Parrot last year, with McMorris taking silver; McMorris in 2013 and 2012; and Sebastien Toutant in 2011.

Personality and performance made McMorris a social media star of the Sochi Olympics. He was ranked No. 1 by a wide margin in fan interactions on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter as measured by Hookit, a company that tracks athletes' digital influence. After the Winter Games, his popularity translated into everything from public-speaking gigs to big parts in Oakley's new movie and a short feature on McMorris made by Red Bull, one of his sponsors.

"Even when I won a medal, that's just my personality, to be laid back," McMorris says. "People noticed it because it's different than everybody else. What's this mellow snowboarding kid doing, you know, who has a lisp. Who is this kid?"

X Games was the platform that propelled McMorris in snowboarding. But it was the Olympics that vaulted him to a higher level, so the next Winter Games, in 2018 in South Korea, are a primary focus.

"I have some Olympic hopes and wants still," McMorris says. Unfinished business? "Yeah. So to speak. It brought me a lot of frustrations, but it brought me triple the happiness, of everything I went through. It was just so rad. What it created for me, and my life, is huge."

Oakley's film, For Me, was put together quickly after the Olympics. It considers the history of snowboarding, and the film's riders are billed as among "the most talented, versatile and influential groups of snowboarders ever assembled." McMorris had not expected to garner much screen time, but ended up as one of the main names. In it he is paired several times – in the British Columbia back country and in Norway – with Terje Haakonsen, a 40-year-old legend of the sport.

The Red Bull short feature, released this week, is a more intimate look at McMorris's life.

Director Kevin Foley saw in McMorris an athlete relaxed living in front of cameras, an ease in the era of Instagram. Foley had previously made films on Baseball Hall of Famer and former Toronto Blue Jay Roberto Alomar, as well as golfer Mike Weir, the one-time Masters champion. "Mark wants it to be authentically his," says Foley.

McMorris, even as he aims for the 2018 Winter Olympics, is cutting back on contests this winter, focusing only on the biggest ones. A new showcase is the first Air + Style event, a snowboard contest that started in Austria, expanded to Beijing and is landing in the United States now that Shaun White has purchased a majority stake in the event with plans to transform it.

The two-day show will be staged at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif., on Feb. 21 and 22, with snowboarding and freestyle skiing complemented by music, food, fashion and art. The centrepiece remains a 16-storey-tall jump: The ramp is 140 metres long and the jump is 21 metres high, off which athletes perform gyroscopic flips and spins. McMorris is billed as one of the main riders.

White jumped from Olympic halfpipe golds in 2006 and 2010 to celebrity and business riches. Slopestyle's success in 2014 was clear when it became a marquee event in its first Olympics. "It's cool the Olympics sort of see that they need us," McMorris says. "Youth culture wants to see snowboarding."

With Air + Style, White hopes to take another leap.

"He's trying to make snowboarders into superstars," McMorris says. "He's trying to give back, so it's cool. And I'm not complaining about a little contest in February in L.A. It's so weird."

Follow related authors and topics

Authors and topics you follow will be added to your personal news feed in Following.

Interact with The Globe