Will Chloe Kim Compete Again in the 2018 Olympic?
The Bang-up Read
A Teen Sensation Grows Upward
Everyone seemed to love Chloe Kim when she was a snowboarding prodigy on her way to an Olympic aureate medal. When she saw the downside of fame, she stepped back and built a life beyond the halfpipe.
Credit... Alicia Afshar for The New York Times
LOS ANGELES — The American snowboarder Chloe Kim was 17 years old at the terminal Winter Olympics, in Pyeongchang, where she gleefully stomped her way to a gold medal in the halfpipe.
Her nearly-perfect runs came after a viral tweet about breakfast ("I'k getting hangry," she wrote moments before her performance) and ended in the embrace of her parents, immigrants from South Korea. Hers may take been the biggest moment of the Olympics for two countries.
Soon, though, she thought of retiring.
Success felt like a tightening trap. She suffocated nether the crush of instant attending, a perk and curse of Olympic success. Ane 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 experience like her big moment belonged to anybody else?
And and then there was the Instagram message she received after the Games, a note from a top snowboarder. It was intended for someone else. Information technology landed in Kim'due south phone.
"Cocky ass bitch," it called her.
Information technology stung. The barb is still hooked inside.
"My 17-, eighteen-year-sometime self was a lot more than immature — like spiral information technology all, I'm done," Kim said. "I'k going to take a interruption and revisit this conversation later on."
Later on has arrived. Kim, 21, has soared past the historic period of innocence to state back hither, the favorite to win at another Olympics, nevertheless unsure of what people make of her.
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"When I was 13 and I was up and coming and I was doing really well in events, it was similar everyone was on my side," she said. "Like, 'Go, Chloe!' and 'Good chore, Chloe, wait at you go!' Then afterward I won, the free energy completely changed, and I was embarrassed to win contests. I knew that if I did well once more, people would dump on me."
And then the errant message.
"I just felt like anybody is out to get me or something," Kim said. "So I was like, OK, if I'thou going to be the villain in the story, then I don't know if I want to do it. It's merely not fun."
She broke her right ankle in early 2019, a approval in hindsight, 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 educatee. She sought out friends with various interests and backgrounds. She surrounded herself with people and things that reciprocate dear, regardless of snowboarding success: dogs, horses, a boyfriend, new school friends, family unit.
Kim returned from her snowboarding hiatus last Jan, more refreshed than rusty. She won her offset event, then the X Games, so the earth championship.
This calendar week, she begins her Olympic flavour with a Dew Tour stop in Copper Mountain, Colo., confronting an international field. She will be expected to win every contest she enters, especially the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing in February.
Epitome
This is how information technology goes for top Olympic athletes: Win a gold medal, fade away while the real globe churns on, and then reappear on television screens four years later on, every bit if someone undid the Olympic "intermission" button.
But Kim did not pause. She grew up. She is still funny, smart, empty-headed. But she is older, wiser, hardened.
She repeated the words of the Instagram insult. She would not say who wrote them.
"It's definitely ane of those things that I wish I didn't see, only I'm as well grateful," Kim said. "If I didn't run into it, I would have been, like, 'Oh, cool, we're even so all expert.' It'south helpful for me to know. It definitely made me put my guard up a little more, which I recall is OK. You tin't trust anyone."
'Chloe time'
The front entry of Kim'due south new firm was a pileup of shoes, generally Nike-branded sneakers and flip flops. Information technology was a warm fall day, and Kim was excited virtually her plans. She slipped into a pair of worn cowboy boots.
She and her swain, Evan Berle, a U.C.Fifty.A. educatee and old pro skateboarder, drove through Torrance, Calif., ane of several suburbs where Kim grew upwardly. 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 well-nigh equally long as she has snowboarded. It is unclear which brings her the most happiness.
"I'd similar to purchase a ranch," Kim said from the passenger seat as Berle collection. "Have chickens, little pigs … "
"Goats," Berle interjected.
"Evan loves goats," Kim explained. "I dearest pigs. Oh, and I honey donkeys. Maybe some exotic animals, too. Similar parrots."
She told a story about losing her pet parrot, Kiwi, a blueish-crowned conure, when it flew away a few years agone. Zip sounds too tragic or besides 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-upward over the meeting time, and Kim grew frustrated with the delay. She had other things to practise, including a midday workout with her trainer. She wanted to exit.
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Berle works as a steadying influence. He talked her into waiting. They met in 2019 through common friends in the skateboarding earth.
"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 anecdote named Levi, and smoothly climbed on. She led the style 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 all-time female athlete, best female Olympian and best female person activity-sports athlete.
In that location were mag covers (including Sports Illustrated, with Reese, her Australian shepherd), late-dark 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 dorsum-to-dorsum 1080s in the Olympic halfpipe," McDormand said.)
Kim went along with it all. In hindsight, information technology was too much.
"People merely forget that you're immature," she said. "Like, they say that you lot're immature in the headlines, but they don't treat you like a kid."
That fall, she announced that she had enrolled at Princeton.
"I only demand some Chloe fourth dimension," she said. "I need to be man. I demand to exist a normal child for once, because I haven't been able to do that my whole life."
She took physics, French, history and dropped a chemistry grade 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 non 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?"
Simply 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'southward Chloe Kim," equally Kim played pool.
Prototype
Dickson sensed how uncomfortable it must exist. She introduced herself and, at some indicate, 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 yous ever demand assist in French, just achieve 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'due south 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 airtight down the campus in March 2020, belatedly in Kim's freshman year.
"Well, Princeton thank yous 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 then grateful I took a step dorsum to requite myself this experience."
The public health crunch took a toll. Sequestered in her apartment, without the structure and distraction of school or snowboarding, Kim brutal into a funk of loneliness and worry, she said.
"My young man had to brand me stop watching the news, because I would literally sit down in front of the Television receiver and cry," Kim said. "I didn't really know what the symptoms of low were — I just thought it meant yous were sorry, which is non the case. But I had other symptoms. I was really tired all the time. I slept a lot. I wasn't motivated to exercise anything. It was hard for me to go out of bed and go have care of myself."
Among her worries were her parents, Jong Jin and Boran. Kim worried about them contracting Covid-nineteen and nearly the emerging wave of assaults against Asian Americans.
In an as-told-to essay for ESPN in Apr, Kim said that she worried "every time my parents step out the door" that they might be attacked.
Kim spent a babyhood trying to glide by her race, just trying to fit in. The interruption from snowboarding has altered her perspective.
Epitome
She at present 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 then well.
"I started to become numb to information technology, and that's a problem, correct?" Kim said. "I've recently started to realize that it'south non something that I should have e'er had to get used to. It shouldn't happen."
Terminal leap, 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 non have a rich history of diversity, which Kim had noted in the ESPN essay.
"That becomes isolating, too," she wrote last leap. "My friends and teammates were supportive, but I just didn't feel comfy speaking near information technology because they couldn't fully sympathize my experience. I never felt I could talk to anyone, and then being in the spotlight at a young age put me in some other difficult situation. I feel very stuck sometimes."
The present tense was not a typo. Final summer, Kim began weekly therapy sessions.
"I'm giving you lot 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. Information technology was a relief to have them shut again. She sees them nigh every day.
"If I'thousand hungry or peckish mom's food, I'll call my mom," Kim said.
'A legacy athlete'
At a gym in West Hollywood, Chloe Kim works out nether the direction of Roy Chan. They continued in November 2020, the calendar churning toward the next Winter Olympics.
The focus remains on strength and residual 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 lesser of the halfpipe) and lands with her anxiety strapped in place. It is not uncommon for ribs to pop out of place.
Epitome
"She'south 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 plenty core stability to sustain impact."
Chan is at present office of Kim's close circle, another contempo friend from outside of snowboarding. He, too, wishes that she would show the earth more of her personality — "in two words, she'southward very kind and very funny," he said — and knows that Kim wants to be known every bit more than than a snowboarder.
"Nosotros talk almost this a lot," he said. "We both know that correct at present, this is the platform. She needs to continue to win. It's only office of her legacy, and we're talking nigh a legacy athlete here."
Since her return to competition in January she has mostly fended off attention, knowing it is near 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 take been in disguise, on "The Masked Vocalist." She fabricated 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 near snowboarding with Big Bird.
That is the Kim who will re-emerge this winter in the public consciousness — goofy, daring, charming — only in charge, equally much equally she can exist.
"I'yard not anywhere close to a gilt medal," Brolin Mawejje, a snowboarder competing for Republic of uganda who has become friends with Kim, said. "But having gear up my path within snowboarding, every one time in a while you feel that force per unit area of, OK, people want something and I don't know if I can offer everything. No ane understands what you're going through, but they're quick to judge you based on something like winning a medal."
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Kim'due south athletic trajectory echoes that of Shaun White, a former teen awareness, at present 35. Most know White as an Olympic snowboarder, a three-time gold medalist trying to make his 5th Winter Games, only he spent much of the fourth dimension 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 exist 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."
At present 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 abroad from snowboarding subsequently these Olympics. She does not say. She is unlikely to render to Princeton. Most of her friends there would be gone, she pointed out.
For now, information technology is all most the Olympics again. Kim spent much of October in Switzerland, along with dozens of other top snowboarders and winter athletes, training on a glacier in a higher place Saas-Fee. Day after day, working with bus Rick Bower, she practiced in the halfpipe.
She besides joked with friends, played games with American teammates and seemed happy to be back in the game.
Simply in that location were no judges and there was no audience. Information technology 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.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/14/sports/olympics/chloe-kim-snowboarding.html
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