In Emotional Olympic Return After Beating Cancer, Max Parrot Takes Snowboard Slopestyle Gold

At the Pyeongchang Olympics in February 2018, Max Parrot, in a comeback performance, took silver in men’s snowboard slopestyle. He had fallen on his first two runs, upping the stakes for his last attempt. It was clean, vaulting him onto the podium.

Ten months later, Parrot was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

In his career as a professional snowboarder, Parrot had learned about resilience. But this changed the meaning of the word. Over the next six months, he endured 12 rounds of chemotherapy. His hard-earned muscles, gained from hours spent in the gym, atrophied.

But in July 2019, Parrot announced he had beaten his cancer. And in August, he showed the snowboarding world he wasn’t going to miss a beat, winning big air gold at X Games Norway.

On Sunday night (Monday morning in China), Parrot, 27, once again found himself at the top of an Olympic slopestyle run, clad in the Team Canada uniform. Unlike his performance in 2018, this time around, Parrot put down a good first run and a great second run, scoring 90.96 with his technical rail section and going cab 1620, 1440 and 1620 on the jumps.

Having qualified 10th, meaning he was third on the start list in the final, all he could do was wait through an agonizing round of third runs to see if anyone could best his score. The last two riders to go were his teammate, Mark McMorris, and China’s Su Yiming, who finished first in qualifying.

Nerve-wracking.

But neither McMorris nor Yiming could break into the 90s. And with palpable relief, Parrot let his golden moment wash over him.

Parrot’s gold was Canada’s first gold medal at these Games. The Canadian, who shared the podium with his teammate McMorris for the second straight Games, also snapped the United States’ exclusive hold on Olympic slopestyle gold.

American Sage Kotsenburg won the first-ever Olympic slopestyle event when the discipline made its debut at the Games in 2014, and Red Gerard took gold as a 17-year-0ld at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games.

Su Yiming took silver and McMorris took bronze, the third consecutive games that he’s come home with that color of medal.

Parrot has long been progressing slopestyle snowboarding. At X Games in 2013, he claimed the first backside triple cork. The following year, the Bromont, Quebec, native became the first to link two of them together in a slopestyle run. In 2015, Parrot landed the first cab quad underflip 1620. And the year after that, he took big air gold at X Games with his cab 1800 triple cork, an X Games first.

As Parrot demonstrated on Sunday night, he intends to remain the men’s slopestyle standard-bearer for quite some time.