Shaun White eyes Sochi gold in slopestyle, though Craig McMorris predicts he won’t make the podium; photo from Shaun White’s Facebook page
Craig McMorris is the brother of Mark McMorris, the Canadian snowboarder favored to win the slopestyle competition when it debuts in the Winter Olympics next month in Sochi.
Craig, who is also a member of the Canadian national snowboard team, will be in Sochi not as a competitor but as an analyst for CBC/Radio-Canada, and he told Postmedia that he’s going to “bury the bias” and “be very objective and very fair and call it how I see it.”
So, how does he see the slopestyle competition?
“My prediction for slopestyle in Sochi is Mark McMorris first place, Sebastien Toutant second place or no particular order, one-two, whatever they want,” he told Postmedia. “And third place I’m going to say a Norwegian. I’m not going to say who.”
Which means Craig is predicting Shaun White, the two-time defending Olympic gold medalist in the halfpipe, won’t make the podium in slopestyle, a snowboarding discipline he’s been concentrating on ever since it was added to the Winter Games.
Fact is, White hasn’t exactly been tearing it up in slopestyle, a discipline he used to dominate when he won the event in four straight Winter X Games from 2003 to 2006.
An ankle injury forced White to miss the slopestyle event in Breckenridge last month. He returned to compete in the event at Copper Mountain at the end of December and finished third behind Norwegians Staale Sandbech and Torstein Horgmo. But McMorris wasn’t there.
“This is the road to Sochi, not the road to Copper,” White’s coach, Bud Keane, said afterward. “We’re keeping our eyes on the prize and we have every intention of winning.”
As far as the comparisons between White and McMorris? Craig had this to say:
“It’s funny because the media want storylines and they want people to have adversity and they’ve obviously pitted Mark and Shaun against each other,” he told Postmedia. “So, it’s going to be interesting to see when it’s all said and done who’s on top and who got second, who got third. But it’s funny how they just pit them up against each other…What I think about the comparison between Mark and Shaun, though, is it’s all media built. They like each other, they’re friends, they snowboard together. It’s funny to see the background of what actually happens as opposed to what you see on the news. It’s different.”
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