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Mark McMorris’ snowboard career has been record breaking and unbreakable

Mark McMorris once said, “If you get hurt, you just want to get back to it even more. It’s a weird addiction.”

So here McMorris is, at age 31, the oldest man in the field for his events at this weekend’s Winter X Games. He shares the record of 19 career medals with American Jamie Anderson at the annual event in Aspen, Colorado.

“The start list is kind of a trip,” McMorris said. “Not seeing many ‘90s (birth years) in there is definitely pretty crazy. But the fact that I’m still in it and still feel that I have the bag of tricks to do well and still have the drive to try and make a push for another Olympics is pretty special.”

In his 2011 Aspen debut, a 17-year-old McMorris delivered a clutch third and final slopestyle run to jump from fifth to grab silver.

“It quickly clicked in that I’m here to compete against my heroes,” he said. “I also realized I’m meant to be here. I can do this.”

When McMorris won that first X Games medal, his events (slopestyle and big air) weren’t on the Olympic program yet.

He since became the first snowboarder to win a medal at three consecutive Olympics. He took bronze in 2014, which came two weeks after he broke a rib in an X Games crash.

In April 2017, he sustained a fractured left arm, ruptured spleen, stable pelvic fracture, rib fractures and a collapsed left lung in a backcountry accident. “To be honest I was pretty sure I was going to die,” he posted afterward.

The crash and recovery were documented in a 45-minute film, “Unbroken,” with detail including McMorris’ hospital bed scribblings. “First thing he could write down after being in the hospital in intensive care -- I want to go the Olympics. Can I go to the Olympics?” older brother Craig said.

Ten months later, McMorris took bronze again at the 2018 Olympics. He added a third bronze at the 2022 Beijing Games.

He wants to make it to a fourth Olympics in 2026. Once again, McMorris will have to come back from significant injury to do so.

In spring 2023, he cracked his fibula while riding when he clipped a rock buried under the snow.

Then last spring, McMorris’ face was busted by his own knee in a riding accident while filming a Burton/Red Bull project in the British Columbia backcountry. Four little plates were surgically inserted — under his cheek, eye, side of his eye and in and around the nose.

“It’s scarier than ever,” he recently said on the Bomb Hole podcast. “I’m just so over being hurt. I just want to be very careful. I want to mitigate my risk.”

In between those injuries, McMorris competed in just one slopestyle event and went about a year between riding a slopestyle course in training — the longest break of his career.

He still took runner-up at the 2024 X Games. American Red Gerard, the 2018 Olympic gold medalist, edged McMorris by one point, yet still called McMorris “the best snowboarder in the world” in his winner’s interview.

Mark McMorris

Red Gerard (left) and Mark McMorris at the 2024 X Games.

Red Gerard (left) and Mark McMorris at the 2024 X Games. (Trevor Brown, Jr./X Games)

“I took kind of a year to take some space from the competing and seeing if that’s really what I wanted to do,” McMorris said. “I definitely took time to reflect and figured that I’d be silly with my body being in the shape it’s in and the riding level I’m still at to not make another push for the Games.”

McMorris then attended his first Summer Olympics in Paris. He watched fellow Canadians Felix Auger-Aliassime (in the tennis semifinals at Roland Garros) and Summer McIntosh (take gold in swimming).

Also last offseason, he ran into Connor McDavid while attending the Western Conference Finals. McDavid will likely make his Olympic debut in 2026 with NHL players returning to the Games for the first time since 2014.

"(McDavid was joking) like, ‘You’ve been hurt enough. Why are you still doing that? Haven’t you won enough?’” McMorris said. “He was just teasing, for sure. He’s a great guy, good friend. … I received a text from him later that night. He’s like, ‘I’m just playing with you. That’s so epic you’re still going.’”

McMorris’ career has now bridged generations. Neither of his Canadian gold-medal contemporaries, Sébastien Toutant and Max Parrot, has competed in slopestyle or big air events since the 2022 Olympics.

The new class includes Cameron Spalding, a 19-year-old from Ontario. He won two World Cups already this season and is ranked No. 1 in the world in slopestyle. McMorris’ debut at the Burton U.S. Open in 2009 came the week of Spalding’s fourth birthday.

“I vividly remember that from my first X Games, just waiting for the sled and practice and Shaun White rolls up, and I’m just like, holy s—-,” McMorris said. “I would imagine they (young Canadian snowboarders) get that similar feeling the first time they compete with me or meet me. I definitely think back to when I was a little kid and just try and treat them all as friends and not any bigger than them because I’ve definitely been in their position before.”

While McMorris would love to add Olympic gold to his medal collection that rests at his family’s lake house, he’s not emphasizing it.

“I’m just really proud of how I rode at most events in my life,” he said. “Sometimes there’s little bobbles that keep you in second or third. Sometimes you get the nudge and get onto the top of the box, but, yeah, it’s funny that it hasn’t really happened at the Olympics. My goal is obviously to make the team and then go there and ride to the best of my ability. And if I do that, I think I would have a pretty solid chance at standing on the box, if not the top.”

Chloe Kim and Maddie Mastro are the only women to land a double cork 1080 in halfpipe competition.