Snowboarder Max Parrot Wins Gold at the X Games Despite Cancer Diagnosis

What a comeback! Shortly before Christmas 2018, Max Parrot was diagnosed with lymph gland cancer. Less than a year later, the Canadian snowboarder has now won the Big Air X-Games competition in Oslo - just over two months after his last chemotherapy on 13 June.

"That was a few hard months, it was very, very hard," said Parrot after the contest: "But I trained harder than ever, and that was the deciding factor."

For the silver medallist in slopestyle at the 2018 Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, it was already the sixth victory at the X-Games and the fifth in the Big Air contest.

Parrot dared to make the most difficult jumps back in training just one week before the competition.

On Instagram, one day after his triumph, Parrot wrote: "Yesterday was honestly one of the best day of my life!!! Memories I will never forget!!! I’ve been working crazy hard and been pushing the limits everyday more than I ever did during the past 2 months. So it means a lot to me to have win the @xgames !! But what means even more is the hell of a good time I got on my board yesterday riding with the homies!