Team Canada’s soaring snowboarding legacy continues with a new generation 

Over the last decade, Canadian names such as Mark McMorris, Max Parrot, and Sébastien Toutant have been synonymous with slopestyle and big air snowboarding. 

That is no surprise when all three are three-time Olympians and have seven Olympic medals between them. 

McMorris in particular, who also owns a whopping 22 X Games medals, is the guy that young Canadian snowboarders grew up watching. And some of those young snowboarders, now in their late teens and early twenties, include the likes of Liam Brearley and Cameron Spalding, who are now McMorris’s teammates and are making names for themselves on the international scene.

“We both got on the team looking up to Mark, and it’s pretty crazy that we were and still are training with him,” said Brearley.

“He’s been around forever, he’s won everything. I watched him win everything growing up,” said Spalding. “He’s the guy I wanted to be like.”

Brearley, 21, made himself known at the 2020 Winter Youth Olympic Games in Lausanne, where he won three medals—a slopestyle silver, a big air bronze, and a halfpipe bronze. He quickly followed up by reaching his first podium on the FIS World Cup circuit in February 2020.

But the 2023-24 season was a true breakthrough one for Brearley. He won slopestyle gold at the 2024 Dew Tour and snowboard knuckle huck gold at the 2024 Winter X Games—an event he only got into as an alternate. At the end of the season, Brearley was crowned the FIS World Cup champion for men’s snowboard slopestyle on the strength of two victories, taking home the coveted Crystal Globe trophy—the first Canadian to do so in the discipline.

“Last season was pretty crazy for me,” Brearley said from his home in Gravenhurst, Ont. “I started the season with an injury, so I was pretty determined to get back into it quickly in the fall. I just had a lot of contests go well and ended up getting an alternate spot for the X Games. Then ending up winning knuckle huck there—that was definitely sort of a breakout moment.”

Unsurprisingly, the X Games are high on Brearley’s list of competitions to look forward to in the 2024-25 season.

“It’s the event you dream of since you were little, and I’m just really hyped to go back,” Brearley said. “But I also want to get some World Cup results to have a good ranking going into next year for the Olympic qualification.”

Brearley isn’t the only up and coming member of the new generation of Team Canada snowboarders. At only 19 years old, Spalding is also making his mark internationally. He has already started this season off with a bang, notching his first career FIS World Cup victory in September, winning the slopestyle event in Cardrona, New Zealand.

“It’s a pretty surreal feeling to be standing on top of the podium after so much training and travel. Finally winning a World Cup—it’s pretty nuts, and it just made me hungry for more” said Spalding.

Both Spalding and Brearley got into the sport at a young age. Spalding believes that he was around three when his parents got him into it.

“They chucked me on a snowboard as soon as they could,” Spalding chuckled.

Brearley also grew up in a family who spent weekends on the slopes. He received his first snowboard from his grandparents for his seventh birthday.

It was all downhill (with a lot of jumps and tricks) from there for both athletes. Brearley was actually scouted on his local hill by Elliott Catton, who is now one of Team Canada’s high performance coaches, about a year and a half after he started boarding.

“It’s kind of cool that he’s also my coach now.”

For both Brearley and Spalding, the Canadian slopestyle/big air snowboarding team has become like a second family.

“We have a lot of riders that will be competing with one another for spots at the Olympics, but I think being a strong team in snowboarding brings us together,” Brearley said. “Our team is more like a family than a lot of the other teams, I would say. And that might be because we train together a lot more than some of the other teams. But I think all of us being at that level and competing with each other for the spots for our own country definitely pushes us all more.”

“We all do it because we love it,” said Spalding. “There’s never a day where it feels like work or feels like a job. It’s just another day snowboarding on the mountains with your friends, pushing each other, and trying to become the best snowboarder you can be.”

The slopestyle snowboarding that Team Canada fans saw when McMorris won the first of his three Olympic bronze medals in the discipline’s debut at Sochi 2014 will not be the same as what they see at Milano Cortina 2026. 

“The sport is always changing, always evolving, so we have to be constantly learning new stuff. Our jumps are getting bigger, they’re changing in shape which allows you to do different tricks. And people are always trying to push the sport in different ways to be as innovative as possible,” said Spalding. 

The increasingly common use of airbags to try out new tricks has helped push the sport already known for its feats of daredevilness even further without sacrificing safety.

“You can practice on those and try new tricks without the consequences of landing on snow and ice,” said Spalding. 

Brearley says that one of the things that McMorris has imparted upon the younger generation of athletes is that every boarder needs to figure out what works best for him or her. 

“I think the biggest thing he’s taught us is that you should really work with the coaches and experiment yourself to figure out what works for you, including in contests,” Brearley said. “You don’t have to do the same thing as everyone else.”

Team Canada’s slopestyle snowboarders will be competing at home February 20-22 when  the FIS World Cup comes to Calgary. The FIS World Championships will take place in Engadin, Switzerland in March.

Rapid fire with Liam Brearley and Cameron Spalding

An athlete that you look up to?

CS: I’d say Mark McMorris, for sure.

LB: I would also say Mikey Ciccarelli.

Favourite place to train?

CS: I’d say Whistler. It’s a second home to me at this point.

LB: Mammoth Mountain…when it’s not windy.

If you weren’t a snowboarder, what Olympic sport would you want to do?

CS: Golf—I spend most of my summers golfing.

LB: Surfing. I think surfing is really sick and really impressive. But I can barely surf…and I’m pretty good on a lot of boards…