"The whole industry knows": Canada's McMorris blasts Olympic judging
Canadian Mark McMorris isn’t thrilled about the judging that landed fellow countryman Max Parrot gold in slopestyle at the 2022 Beijing Olympics.Ā
And he hasn’t been shy to share that opinion.Ā
McMorris, who captured bronze in the snowboarding event, felt he deserved better.Ā
“Obviously would have been nice to have a different shade of medal,” McMorris said in an interview with CBC. “But knowing that I kind of had the run of the day, and one of the best rounds of my life and the whole industry knows what happened — pretty, pretty crazy.”
McMorris isn’t alone in the criticism.Ā
The coach of Chinese snowboarding star Su Yiming, who earned silver in the event, asked fans to stop criticizing judges, according to Bloomberg.
The issue stems from a missed error on Parrot’s run.Ā
Replays of the run showed a double-knee grab that went undetected by judges, who did not request another look at a run they deemed to be clean in real-time. The judges, nine in total, assign scores while watching a video feed.
“Usually that would be considered a ‘not make,'” McMorris said in the CBC interview. “But the judges missed it, and I’m sure they’re feeling s—-y about it. But it’s not their fault that the feed they had was garbage.”
Parrot’s winning run received a score of 90.96. Yiming was second at 88.70, and McMorris was third — his third consecutive Olympic bronze at the event — with a score of 88.53.
“Everyone that snowboards knows I missed that grab. I’m not hiding from that. It is what it is,” Parrot told CBC.Ā
Iztok Sumatic, the head judge in Beijing, told snowboarding site Whitelines “we judged what we saw.”
“We just had this camera angle that they gave us, and it looked clean. It wasn’t just us; there were coaches we spoke to after who said, ‘Hey, when we saw that, we were like, ‘Bam, this is an insane run,'” Sumatic said, according to the website.
“We judged what we saw, and everyone felt confident with it.”
Sumatic also confirmed there was no request for a replay from the judges.
“Obviously it’s a sick thing to get. And I would love to get [an Olympic gold medal],” McMorris said. “But at the end of the day, I just want to go out there and land my hardest s–t and land it really well.
“I’m kind of done talking like, ‘Oh, it’s a disappointment if I don’t get a gold medal’ or ‘I need that’ because you can land the best stuff and sometimes the judges mess up.”