A Teen Sensation Grows Up

LOS ANGELES — The American snowboarder Chloe Kim was 17 years old at the last Winter Olympics, in Pyeongchang, where she gleefully stomped her way to a gold medal in the halfpipe.

Her near-perfect runs came after a viral tweet about breakfast (“I’m getting hangry,” she wrote moments before her performance) and ended in the embrace of her parents, immigrants from South Korea. Hers may have been the biggest moment of the Olympics for two countries.

Soon, though, she thought of retiring.

Success felt like a tightening trap. She suffocated under the crush of instant attention, a perk and curse of Olympic success. One of her dominant memories from winning was escaping to a bathroom just to be alone, to get a look at the medal she had earned. Why did it feel like her big moment belonged to everyone else?

And then there was the Instagram message she received after the Games, a note from a top snowboarder. It was intended for someone else. It landed in Kim’s phone.

“Cocky ass bitch,” it called her.

It stung. The barb is still hooked inside.

“My 17-, 18-year-old self was a lot more immature — like screw it all, I’m done,” Kim said. “I’m going to take a break and revisit this conversation later.”

Later has arrived. Kim, 21, has soared past the age of innocence to land back here, the favorite to win at another Olympics, yet unsure of what people make of her.

“When I was 13 and I was up and coming and I was doing really well in events, it was like everyone was on my side,” she said. “Like, ‘Go, Chloe!’ and ‘Good job, Chloe, look at you go!’ Then after I won, the energy completely changed, and I was embarrassed to win contests. I knew that if I did well again, people would dump on me.”

And then the errant message.

“I just felt like everyone is out to get me or something,” Kim said. “So I was like, OK, if I’m going to be the villain in the story, then I don’t know if I want to do it. It’s just not fun.”

She broke her right ankle in early 2019, a blessing in retrospect, shooing her away from the sport she was not sure she loved, or that loved her. She slipped from the spotlight. She spent 22 months without strapping into a snowboard, an unheard-of voluntary detox for a top athlete just reaching her prime.

She went to Princeton and tried to be a regular college student. She sought out friends with diverse interests and backgrounds. She surrounded herself with people and things that reciprocate love, regardless of snowboarding success: dogs, horses, a boyfriend, new school friends, family.

Kim returned from her snowboarding hiatus last January, more refreshed than rusty. She won her first event, then the X Games, then the world championship.

This week, she begins her Olympic season with a Dew Tour stop in Copper Mountain, Colo., against an international field. She will be expected to win every contest she enters, especially the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing in February.

This is how it goes for top Olympic athletes: Win a gold medal, fade away while the real world churns on, then reappear on television screens four years later, as if someone undid the Olympic “pause” button.

But Kim did not pause. She grew up. She is still funny, smart, silly. But she is older, wiser, hardened.

She repeated the words of the Instagram insult. She would not say who wrote them.

“It’s definitely one of those things that I wish I didn’t see, but I’m also grateful,” Kim said. “If I didn’t see it, I would have been, like, ‘Oh, cool, we’re still all good.’ It’s helpful for me to know. It definitely made me put my guard up a little more, which I think is OK. You can’t trust anyone.”

‘Chloe time’

The front entry of Kim’s new house was a pileup of shoes, mostly Nike-branded sneakers and flip flops. It was a warm fall day, and Kim was excited about her plans. She slipped into a pair of worn cowboy boots.

She and her boyfriend, Evan Berle, a U.C.L.A. student and former pro skateboarder, drove through Torrance, Calif., one of several suburbs where Kim grew up. They hurried to an appointment at a small stable in Palos Verdes Estates, among rolling hills of ranch homes and twisting roads.

Kim has ridden horses nearly as long as she has snowboarded. It is unclear which brings her the most happiness.

“I’d like to purchase a ranch,” Kim said from the passenger seat as Berle drove. “Have chickens, little pigs … ”

“Goats,” Berle interjected.

“Evan loves goats,” Kim explained. “I love pigs. Oh, and I love donkeys. Maybe some exotic animals, too. Like parrots.”

She told a story about losing her pet parrot, Kiwi, a blue-crowned conure, when it flew away a few years ago. Nothing sounds too tragic or too amazing when it comes from Kim. She is adept at delivering lines in a pleasant deadpan.

At the corral, Kim and Berle watched a farrier re-shoe several horses while they waited for the trail guide. There was a mix-up over the meeting time, and Kim grew frustrated with the delay. She had other things to do, including a midday workout with her trainer. She wanted to leave.

Berle works as a steadying influence. He talked her into waiting. They met in 2019 through mutual friends in the skateboarding world.

“I’m glad I met you now, because I was not cute when I was younger,” Kim said.

The guide arrived. She had no idea who Kim was. Kim perked up, helped saddle a chestnut named Levi, and smoothly climbed on. She led the way down the trail. She turned back to Berle and beamed.

That easygoing effervescence, combined with singular talent, made Kim a major star in 2018. She won ESPYs for best female athlete, best female Olympian and best female action-sports athlete.

There were magazine covers (including Sports Illustrated, with Reese, her Australian shepherd), late-night interviews, a Corn Flakes box. There was a Kim-inspired Barbie doll, a cameo in a Maroon 5 video and an Oscar-acceptance-speech shout out from Frances McDormand (“I think this is what Chloe Kim must have felt like after doing back-to-back 1080s in the Olympic halfpipe,” McDormand said.)

Kim went along with it all. In hindsight, it was too much.

“People just forget that you’re young,” she said. “Like, they say that you’re young in the headlines, but they don’t treat you like a kid.”

That fall, she announced that she had enrolled at Princeton.

“I just need some Chloe time,” she said. “I need to be human. I need to be a normal kid for once, because I haven’t been able to do that my whole life.”

She took physics, French, history and dropped a chemistry course because it was too hard, she said. Her favorite class was anthropology. She joined the equestrian club for a bit — she found that she did not fit in, she said — and lived alone.

“I didn’t want a roommate,” she said. “What if my roommate was crazy and, like, posted pictures of me sleeping or something?”

But she was determined to fit in, attending parties, football games and campus events. Kezia Dickson, a student from New York, vaguely knew who Kim was. She saw people stare at Kim in the dining hall. She heard them whisper, “Oh, my God, that’s Chloe Kim,” as Kim played pool.

Dickson sensed how uncomfortable it must be. She introduced herself and, at some point, mentioned that she was struggling in French, a language familiar to Kim.

“Chloe gave me her phone number and was like, ‘I really like chatting with you, and if you ever need help in French, just reach out to me,’” Dickson recalled. “I did, and she actually answered the phone. And then we went to the library and she tutored me for three hours. And she would do it every other week.”

Kim was drawn to people who knew little about snowboarding.

“She was really trying to branch out, and the people that she’s remained close with are nothing like her in terms of experiences,” Dickson said. “That’s what she appreciated — getting to know people for their experiences, and not what they’re trying to accomplish.”

The coronavirus pandemic closed down the campus in March 2020, late in Kim’s freshman year.

“Well, Princeton thank you for everything for real,” Kim wrote on Twitter. “I feel like college has taught me so many things I couldn’t get through snowboarding and I am so grateful I took a step back to give myself this experience.”

The public health crisis took a toll. Sequestered in her apartment, without the structure and distraction of school or snowboarding, Kim fell into a funk of loneliness and worry, she said.

“My boyfriend had to make me stop watching the news, because I would literally sit in front of the TV and cry,” Kim said. “I didn’t really know what the symptoms of depression were — I just thought it meant you were sad, which is not the case. But I had other symptoms. I was really tired all the time. I slept a lot. I wasn’t motivated to do anything. It was hard for me to get out of bed and go take care of myself.”

Among her worries were her parents, Jong Jin and Boran. Kim worried about them contracting Covid-19 and about the emerging wave of assaults against Asian Americans.

In an as-told-to essay for espn.com in April, Kim said that she worried “every time my parents step out the door” that they might be attacked.

Kim spent a childhood trying to glide past her race, just trying to fit in. The break from snowboarding has altered her perspective.

She now thinks of all the insults, intentional or not, she has endured and ignored — from countless comments on social media to an incident in a restaurant years ago, when a group of men laughed at her with her family, surprised the little girl could speak English so well.

“I started to get numb to it, and that’s a problem, right?” Kim said. “I’ve recently started to realize that it’s not something that I should have ever had to get used to. It shouldn’t happen.”

Last spring, she joined the soccer player Alex Morgan, the basketball player Sue Bird and the swimmer Simone Manuel in launching a media and commerce company called Togethxr, where “representation and equality is the norm.”

Snowboarding does not have a rich history of diversity, which Kim had noted in the ESPN essay.

“That becomes isolating, too,” she wrote last spring. “My friends and teammates were supportive, but I just didn’t feel comfortable speaking about it because they couldn’t fully understand my experience. I never felt I could talk to anyone, and then being in the spotlight at a young age put me in another difficult situation. I feel very stuck sometimes.”

The present tense was not a typo. Last summer, Kim began weekly therapy sessions.

“I’m giving you a layer or two of the onion,” she said. “My therapist gets the whole onion, to the core.”

Last summer, she and Berle moved into a new and modern home on the west side of Los Angeles, not far from the beach. Her parents moved into her old apartment a few blocks away. It was a relief to have them close again. She sees them nearly every day.

“If I’m hungry or craving mom’s food, I’ll call my mom,” Kim said.

‘A legacy athlete’

At a gym in West Hollywood, Chloe Kim works out under the direction of Roy Chan. They connected in November 2020, the calendar churning toward the next Winter Olympics.

The focus remains on strength and balance in the joints and the core. In the air, Kim rotates like a gymnast. Then she falls from 30 or more feet (the lip is 22 feet above the bottom of the halfpipe) and lands with her feet strapped in place. It is not uncommon for ribs to pop out of place.

“She’s very, very flexible, like hyper-mobile,” Chan said. “Her ability to contort and twist her body allows her to do all the tricks. We’ve got to make sure there is enough core stability to sustain impact.”

Chan is now part of Kim’s close circle, another recent friend from outside of snowboarding. He, too, wishes that she would show the world more of her personality — “in two words, she’s very kind and very funny,” he said — and knows that Kim wants to be known as more than a snowboarder.

“We talk about this a lot,” he said. “We both know that right now, this is the platform. She needs to continue to win. It’s just part of her legacy, and we’re talking about a legacy athlete here.”

Since her return to competition in January she has mostly fended off attention, knowing it is about to come, welcomed or not. She has not posted on Twitter in more than a year, and is a sporadic user of Instagram.

It is revealing that her most notable public appearance of the past couple of years may have been in disguise, on “The Masked Singer.” She made a surprisingly good showing, dressed as a jellyfish crooning Crazy, made famous by Patsy Cline.

Another appearance came on Sesame Street, playing herself in a skit about snowboarding with Big Bird.

That is the Kim who will re-emerge this winter in the public consciousness — goofy, daring, charming — but in charge, as much as she can be.

“I’m not anywhere close to a gold medal,” Brolin Mawejje, a snowboarder competing for Uganda who has become friends with Kim, said. “But having set my path within snowboarding, every once in a while you feel that pressure of, OK, people want something and I don’t know if I can offer everything. No one understands what you’re going through, but they’re quick to judge you based on something like winning a medal.”

Kim’s athletic trajectory echoes that of Shaun White, a former teen sensation, now 35. Most know White as an Olympic snowboarder, a three-time gold medalist trying to make his fifth Winter Games, but he spent much of the time between working to be something else — a skateboarder, a musician, an entrepreneur, an anonymous friend and family member.

“When I was younger, I wanted to be more than I was at that time,” he said. “It’s very hard to live in that situation, because it means that no matter how well things go, you still are feeling like you want more, and you want something different.”

Now he views snowboarding as a bonus, he said, something fun he gets to do.

Maybe Kim will compete deep into her 30s. Or maybe she will slide away from snowboarding after these Olympics. She does not say. She is unlikely to return to Princeton. Most of her friends there would be gone, she pointed out.

For now, it is all about the Olympics again. Kim spent much of October in Switzerland, along with dozens of other top snowboarders and winter athletes, training on a glacier above Saas-Fee. Day after day, working with coach Rick Bower, she practiced in the halfpipe.

She also joked with friends, played games with American teammates and seemed happy to be back in the game.

But there were no judges and there was no audience. It was snowboarding without expectations. She might as well have been dressed in a jellyfish costume, or taking classes in New Jersey, or riding a horse with her boyfriend.

She is about to reappear: Chloe Kim, the gold medalist, unpaused for our entertainment.