Tyler Nicholson gets little time to take in the Olympic experience.
In fact, he was not able to attend the opening ceremonies because he is competing early on Saturday morning in PyeongChang.
Nicholson competes in the Men’s Slopestyle tonight with qualifying beginning at 8 p.m.
Tyler’s mother Rosemary Nicholson spoke to students at Widdifield Secondary School on Monday before she departed for South Korea.
She’s amazed and grateful to see her son compete at the Olympics, especially after a horrible injury he sustained back in April put his Olympic dreams in question.
“He overcame a lot of obstacles with that working hard to build up the strength in that left leg with the ACL tear and he also overcame a lot of adversity with people telling him, and people of authority, that you are never going to see the Olympics but his surgeon told him the day of the surgery, all the nurses and doctors were around the OR table and they said, ‘Tyler, we are going to do the best we can with this surgery and then you take it from there, and we are all going to be cheering you on at the 2018 Olympics,’ and after that he was sedated,” she recalled.
The 22-year-old joined the national snowboard team for the 2013-14 season and just missed qualifying for Sochi 2014.
As a 14-year-old he had won bronze at the 2010 Ontario Winter Games, sparking his dream of representing Canada internationally. Two years later he finished sixth in slopestyle at the inaugural Winter Youth Olympic Games in Innsbruck.
He followed that up with a gold medal at the 2013 FIS Junior World Championships.
In January 2017, Nicholson earned his third career World Cup podium as part of a Canadian slopestyle sweep at the Laax Open when he placed third behind teammates Max Parrot and Mark McMorris.
Just a few days later, he captured his first career X Games medal, winning slopestyle silver in Aspen.
