Ski jumper Mackenzie Boyd-Clowes takes to the air again for Canada

Canada's Mackenzie Boyd-Clowes soars through the air during the Men's Ski Jumping Individual HS 138 event at the Nordic World Championships in Planica, Slovenia, Friday, March 3, 2023. (AP Photo/Darko Bandic)

CALGARY — Mackenzie Boyd-Clowes has returned to ski jumping after a hiatus of two and a half years.

Boyd-Clowes laid down Canada’s final jump of the mixed team event at the 2022 Winter Games for bronze and the country’s first ever Olympic medal in the sport.

The four-time Olympian is back in the air again. Boyd-Clowes competed in a pair of September competitions and provisionally qualified for the 2026 Winter Games in Milan and Cortina, Italy.

“It’s new and fresh and exciting. I took a long break and wasn’t sure whether I would jump again and now I’m doing it,” Boyd-Clowes said.

The 34-year-old from Calgary would join a tiny group of veterans who competed for the host country in 2010 in Vancouver and Whistler, B.C., and remain Olympians in 2026.

Hockey players Marie-Philip Poulin and Sidney Crosby are among them, although Crosby skipped 2018 and 2022 because the NHL did.

Given the dearth of Canadian ski jumping facilities and the need to live abroad most of the year to pursue the sport, Boyd-Clowes’ bid to be a five-time Olympian is complex.

He’ll shuttle between Canada and Europe. The national ski jumping team is based in Slovenia.

“The path to competing at the Olympics is probably as different as can be from competing as a hockey player,” Boyd-Clowes said.

Burnout prompted him to take a break in 2023.

“One of the most difficult parts of being a ski jumper in Canada is that there are no ski jumps in Canada,” he said.

“The amount of time spent away, and for myself, maybe my teammates were better equipped to handle it than I was, but I was just so narrowly focused on the sport at all times and kind of obsessed. That’s a gift and a curse.

“Balance is always a tricky one. I want to maintain the excitement level I have for the sport right now. There have been a lot of times where I’ve felt trapped over in Europe and doing the same thing over again and isolated and not feeling the love for the sport that it deserves.”

Boyd-Clowes worked for an events company in Calgary while he pondered his sport future.

“I tried to have a life without sport in it, which I’ve not had for my entire life,” he said. “It was really good for me in a lot of ways to just get a job and have some kind of stability at home and kind of create a life without always being on the road.

“I could finally put my bag into my closet for the first time ever. It’s back on the floor next to my bed now.”

Boyd-Clowes placed 14th and 16th at a pair of Grand Prix normal hills in Romania in mid-September. The world’s best jumpers then congregated at Predazzo the following week to get competition reps at the 2026 venue.

Boyd-Clowes ranked 46th and 51st in large and normal hill respectively.

“I think some of (my competitors) were maybe surprised that I was jumping at that level without having trained,” he said.

“One of the Polish guys said he thought I was secretly training. There’s no real place to secretly train in Canada besides going to the gym by myself.”

Calgary’s ski jumps from the 1988 Olympic Games closed in 2018. The 2010 Whistler competition jumps are expensive to operate, says Ski Jumping Canada’s high-performance director Todd Stretch.

Whistler has three developmental jumps under 40 metres alongside the normal and big hills, but no plastic on landing pads for use in warmer months.

Calgary has a 20-metre jump constructed on the side of a city dump dubbed the “dump jump.” Squamish, B.C., has a beginner jump and Red Deer, Alta., a developmental jump.

While there’s ways to try the sport in Canada, pursuing it at the highest level currently means living outside the country, Stretch said.

“We’re very limited where we can train and what we do,” he stated. “We’re in dire need of a 60-metre jump. We’ve got the smaller jumps which are great, but 60 metres is where you starting working the air and flight.”

Boyd-Clowes, Matthew Soukup, Alex Loutitt and Abigail Strate combined for mixed team bronze in Beijing.

Loutitt and Strate have since made Canada a women’s ski jumping power, although 2023 world champion Loutitt suffered a season-ending knee injury at Predazzo that will prevent her from competing there in February.

Stretch believes Canada still has the depth to fill its current Olympic quota of three women’s spots.

A couple of Canadian teens are in a men’s NextGen program, but qualifying a second man to join Boyd-Clowes and enter Canada in mixed team in Italy is a tall order, said Stretch.

“The goals remain the same. We’re going to compete and represent Canada,” Boyd-Clowes said. “We don’t have that many athletes, but the ones we do have are determined. It’s inspiring to be around. I’m really grateful to be part of the sport. It’s just cool to be part of a team.”

Donna Spencer, The Canadian Press