An hour northeast of Regina, Mission Ridge Winter Park has one ski lift, 89 metres of elevation, and a terrain park where kids practise tricks to emulate their X Games heroes. In Quebec, an hour or so northwest of the Montreal suburb of L'Assomption, Val Saint-Côme is a little bigger – three lifts, 300 metres of vertical and two terrain parks.
In a country with some of the best mountains and snow on earth – Whistler Blackcomb boasts a dizzying 1,550 metres from peak to village – it is Val Saint-Côme and Mission Ridge that have incubated two young men who have become sudden stars in snowboarding. There is the realistic promise of Olympic gold in 2014 for Quebec's Sebastien Toutant, 19, and Saskatchewan's Mark McMorris, 18, and they have the potential to rank among the sport's greats.
On Saturday night in Aspen, Colo., at the Winter X Games, Toutant and McMorris return to the venue where they shot to the top of snowboarding a year ago. In 2011, the two Canadians won gold and silver, respectively, in slopestyle, an event newly welcomed by the Olympics for 2014 in Sochi, Russia, and surging in popularity.
Toutant and McMorris are two of about three dozen Canadians at the X Games, where Canada is already winning events. On Thursday, Montreal's Kaya Turski, 23, won her third consecutive gold in women's slopestyle, which will also be a new event at Sochi.
This is the 16th year for the Winter X Games and it comes just a week after the death of Sarah Burke. Pioneer of her sport, Burke won four golds at the X Games in skiing in the halfpipe and her absence is deeply felt. On Thursday night she was memorialized in a tribute, broadcast on ESPN.
The risky spectacle of the X Games has become big business, and Toutant and McMorris are in the centre of it. They are winning the biggest contests and are backed by the largest corporate names in action sports. Their emergence comes as snowboarding and slopestyle – a series of big jumps over a 700-metre course – hit prime time. ESPN had previously broadcast slopestyle in the afternoon, and Saturday night's show could crack one million viewers, which is more than any NHL game broadcast this season in the United States.
“If you look at the Olympics, 2010, Vancouver, snowboarding in the halfpipe was the second-most watched sport,” Toutant says. “And I'm sure that slopestyle in Sochi is going to be such a big one.”
On Saturday night McMorris delivered his second gold in two days, winning the slopestyle, with Toutant in fourth. On Friday night, McMorris won gold in the big air contest, and Toutant took bronze. McMorris likely will win male athlete of X Games, which Toutant won last year. McMorris moves on next week to the British Columbia interior, the backcountry at Baldface Lodge near Nelson. Travis Rice stages a contest called "Supernatural," a jump-filled slopestyle-like course on a steep slope, with the aim to crown the world's best all-around snowboarder.
Saskatchewan Snowboarding
Toutant and McMorris have not emerged from an established Canadian development system, like the various levels of youth hockey, or even the network of ski clubs for alpine racing.
McMorris first snowboarded on a family trip to Lake Louise, Alta., when he was 5. There were annual trips west from Regina, and also to nearby Mission Ridge. When McMorris was 11, he and his brother Craig, then 13, became founding riders on Saskatchewan's snowboard team. By 15, in 2009, McMorris had made it to the slopestyle final at the prestigious Burton U.S. Open Snowboarding Championships, where, the same year, Toutant took silver at 16.
