LIVIGNO, Italy — She was bright and bubbly, flashing her famous smile over and over, oozing a cool confidence two days before she competes on a stage she’s owned since she was 17 years old.
These Olympic Games were always going to be different for Chloe Kim, already stamped as the greatest women’s halfpipe snowboarder. They wouldn’t be the zero-sum game the last two were. They couldn’t be, because that’s what her entire career has felt like. That’s what led her, just a few years ago, to seriously consider walking away.
“It’s been a really beautiful journey to learn more about myself and kinda discover who I am as a 25-year-old now, proud owner of a frontal lobe,” Kim said Monday at Livigno Snow Park. “It’s pretty interesting to manage, but we’re doing it.”
She laughed. She needed to. It’s been a stressful few weeks. It’s been a stressful few years.
Across a 30-minute session with the international media, Kim looked and sounded at ease, comfortable with however her third Games play out. She fist-bumped her teammates. She defended their right to speak up on the tense American political climate back home after Hunter Hess faced backlash from President Donald Trump. She acknowledged a tinge of anxiety, but nothing a tall matcha drink and some good vibes from her family won’t help quiet.
“We have a really fun squad, and I think that’ll help me stay focused and remind myself why I’m here — which is to have fun,” Kim said.
She seemed unbothered by the stakes awaiting her this week, when she’ll try to become the first halfpipe snowboarder in Olympic history — male or female — to win three consecutive gold medals. That’s something Shaun White, the United States’ most accomplished snowboarder, couldn’t even accomplish. White’s golds came in 2006, 2010 and 2018. He finished fourth in 2014. “Hopefully, she can get it done. I’m really hoping she does,” he told The Athletic.
Due to a recent injury, her challenge looks as steep as Livigno’s 23-foot halfpipe walls. Kim will chase history with a dislocated shoulder that wiped out a good chunk of her pre-Olympic prep.
She tore her labrum while training in Switzerland in late January; in a video she posted of her fall, her snowboard seems to catch in the snow before she slides up the side of the halfpipe, leading her left shoulder to smack hard against the icy wall. This came a few weeks after she pulled out of a World Cup event in Colorado — where she had been the top qualifier — after a crash in practice. “Definitely hit a couple bumps in the road,” she said.
The dislocation didn’t require surgery, but it will require her to wear a brace during competition. “Shoulder’s feeling good,” Kim said, acknowledging the most irritating part so far has been all the tape she’s had to remove after each training session.
These Games, in fact, will be her first competition of the season.
Chloe Kim trains at Livigno Snow Park on Monday. (Hannah Peters / Getty Images)
Pain is not likely to be a factor, said Dr. Kevin Stone, an orthopedic surgeon and former U.S. Ski Team physician. Balance could be.
“For a snowboarder, the problem is when she’s in the air, she uses her arms the way a cat uses its tail, sort of stabilizing herself in space,” Stone said. “That way she can land properly.”
Comfort is vital, especially in the air. Snowboarders routinely soar 20 feet above the halfpipe, twist and turn and flip their bodies, then have to land at speeds around 25 miles an hour.
“The limitation for someone like Chloe is that when she’s in the air, that normal arm movement — swinging out to the side or above her head or whatever position she needs it to be in — is going to be a little bit limited no matter what,” Stone added.
“Now, great athletes like her can accommodate for that. But it’s pretty tricky to do.”
The risk is obvious, but so is the reward. If Kim falls, Stone said she could dislocate her shoulder again, increasing the chances of a full tear.
“But,” he added, “I think the Olympic gold medal is too enticing not to try.”
Even with the setback, Kim remains the favorite, simply because her track record in this event is unmatched on the women’s side. A third straight gold medal would further cement her as one of the United States’ greatest Winter Olympians.
“I feel confident,” she said. “I feel really good about how I’m feeling physically and mentally, and I think that’s the most important thing right now.”
Her forthcoming run is completely new, a routine she’s never done in competition. The aim: pull it off, then live with whatever results come.
Chloe Kim receives medical treatment after suffering an injury during training in December in Copper Mountain, Colo. (Maddie Meyer / Getty Images)
The refreshed approach runs counter to so much of her upbringing and early success. For Kim, winning became the expectation, the mandate. She started in the sport at 4 and was competing by 6. Snowboarding was never a hobby, never just a weekend diversion from school and the like, because Jong Jim Kim had a plan for his daughter, who happened to be a natural the first time she ever clicked her boots into a snowboard.
“The goal wasn’t, ‘This is cool,’” Chloe said last summer in a wide-ranging interview on the “What Shapes Us” podcast with Selema Masakela. “The goal was the Olympics.” She remembers her father telling her that if she wasn’t excelling by 13, they’d have to pull her out of the sport. It was too expensive.
But that was never a problem for the prodigy who became the best in the world.
The pressure grated on her for a decade, and hidden behind her success and stardom was a young girl starting to resent herself. Kim’s origin story, long documented, is far more nuanced than cushy TV segments would lend us to believe.
Start when she was 9, after she’d won a competition overseas with a rented snowboard because hers broke. She spent the next three nights sleeping at the airport because the family had to fly standby on Korean Air. She remembers her aunts trying to convince her to quit snowboarding, “get a real career and focus on school.”
By 9, she moved to Switzerland to train more rigorously. By 13, she was back in California and already the family’s breadwinner.
It weighed on her, the pressure compounding as the years passed. She claimed her first X Games gold at 14, then spent that night crying herself to sleep. At 16, she hated winning, because winning meant more attention, more pressure, more nasty messages every time she picked up her phone. She started to feel like the villain in her own story.
Even Olympic gold a year later in Pyeongchang — the week that thrust her into the national consciousness — saddled her with a private pain that took years to process. Kim, lest we forget, is one of the first star athletes to have grown up in the social media era. Among the messages she would receive back then, she told Masakela, “You’re taking medals away from American White girls.”
All of it started to suffocate her. She later revealed that she grew so angry she dumped her gold medal in a trash bin at her parents’ house. At one point, she took a 22-month break from the sport, enrolling at Princeton, hiding from her celebrity as much as she could.
“Sometimes I need to learn when to back off,” Kim said Monday. “I think taking a lot of time has been really important for me and my mental well-being. Because when I’m out there, I’m always giving it 150 percent, and though it’s really fun and it’s really satisfying, I get exhausted. My body gets destroyed. And I just need to chill and go home and be in the sun in California and go shopping.”
Problem was, after she returned, she kept winning, including another gold in Beijing in 2022. After that, Kim sank further into what she called “a severe depression.” Her motivation faded. Her confidence, too. Another extended break followed. “I thought I looked disgusting,” she told Masakela. “I didn’t like myself that much.”
She holed up inside her Los Angeles home, ordering takeout delivery almost every day. When she did venture out, she said, it was usually with a knife, pepper spray and a Taser. Snowboarding had long been her release, the outlet that brought her the most joy. Now it was leaving her feeling isolated, even ashamed.
“It all had to blow up at some point,” she said. “I bottled that s— up for years and years.”
She resisted therapy, even lying about it in public, before finally relenting. It changed her. Settled her. Gave her an outlet to process becoming a teenage sensation and everything that came with it. Why had she started snowboarding in the first place? Was it for her or her father?
And why was she still doing it?
She found answers, and found joy in simply being on the snow again, regardless of results or expectations. She’s won everything. She’s done proving herself. She no longer needs to.
“I’ve learned so much,” Kim said. “Every hard day I have is a fabulous opportunity to learn and, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to learn more about myself and what my boundaries are, and what I’m capable of.”
The chase for gold medal No. 3 commences Wednesday, with finals coming Thursday under the lights in northern Italy. If Kim carried any stress with her to her third Olympic Games, she wasn’t showing it Monday. She won’t let a result define what could be her last time on her sport’s biggest stage. Or a bum shoulder.
“In a funny way, it’s made my riding better, maybe?” she wondered, theorizing that all the energy she’s put into rehabbing her shoulder has actually helped distract her from the angst she usually feels as a competition nears. Her routine, she vowed, “is dialed.”
All that’s left is her sport’s biggest stage, the one she’s owned ever since she first arrived on the scene.