#THE WEEK MAGAZINE US FULL#
In PyeongChang, Kim became the first woman to land back-to-back 1080s-three full rotations in the air-at an Olympics, and a few months later she was the first woman to land a front-side double cork 1080-essentially flipping herself upside down twice during an aerial rotation-in a halfpipe. What hasn’t changed for Kim is her dominance on the halfpipe.
It’s like an annoying mosquito in the background, just flying around.” Photograph by Bryan Huynh Collective for TIME Kim, photographed in Los Angeles in December, will defend gold in Beijing “I guess I would tell my younger self that even though things get hard and people are mean to you or whatever, it’ll get better and you’re going to realize that you have so much good happening in your life, that the bad isn’t going to hurt you. “I don’t care anymore,” Kim says, wrapping up lunch. And she took time off from snowboarding to attend college, hoping to experience life like a normal teenager. She embraced therapy after the pandemic made her recognize the need to tend to her mental health. Kim now speaks openly about the racism she experienced competing in a mostly white sport, and how hate crimes against Asian Americans have left her feeling vulnerable and scared. But four years of growing up in the spotlight have both hardened her exterior and made her willing to reveal what’s going on behind the perma-smile. Kim is, indeed, warm in conversation, genuinely friendly and easy to laugh. And it has helped make her extraordinarily successful off the mountain: her annual endorsement income is in the mid-seven figures, according to an industry source. I just want to get my f-cking ham and cheese sandwich and go.”īubbly is Kim’s “big brand,” she says, her fingers making air quotes as she speaks the words. I just had the most exhausting two months of my life, and the minute I get home I’m getting hassled. Everyone was like, ‘I just met her, and she’s such a bitch.’ I’m not a bitch. And I appreciate that everyone loves and supports me, but I just wish people could understand what I was going through up to that point. I just wanted a day where I was left alone. “The minute I come home, I can’t even go to my goddamn favorite place,” Kim says, remembering what it felt like. She panicked, ran out of the store and drove away. But when she walked in, everyone turned around to stare. Kim was wearing mismatched pajamas and unmade hair-she was just out to grab a sandwich. She remembers it hit her shortly after PyeongChang, when she went to a Corner Bakery near her family home in Southern California. Photograph by Bryan Huynh Collective for TIMEīeneath the adulation, Kim was still a teenager living with her parents, struggling with the constraints of sudden celebrity and the post-Olympic depression common to elite athletes who spend their lives training for a moment that comes only once every four years. The Seoul Broadcasting System created a short documentary on her. In South Korea, where Kim’s parents were born and her extended family still lives, she was celebrated as a hero. Suddenly, she was making the rounds of late-night shows, got a Barbie doll designed in her likeness and was shouted out by Frances McDormand at the Oscars. She was an unguarded 17-year-old, quick with a smile and a joke (her tweets about eating churros and feeling “hangry” during the competition were the stuff of a viral marketer’s dream). But fame came fast and hard for Kim, whose gravity-defying twists and flips made her the youngest female Olympic gold medalist in snowboarding history. And none weighed heavier on her than the gold medal from the Olympics in PyeongChang. Kim has a conflicted relationship with the plaudits she has racked up on her path from child halfpipe prodigy to the world’s top female snowboarder. But it wouldn’t be surprising if many of them stay there. Upstairs, a mishmash of snowboarding awards are piled into a box, since Kim and Berle haven’t built enough shelving to display all the hardware. Christmas tree with an ornament featuring the paw print of her beloved mini Australian shepherd, Reese, looms over the living room. “I hated life,” Kim, now 21, recalls over plates of pad thai in the airy four-bedroom home in the west side of Los Angeles she shares with her boyfriend, skateboarder Evan Berle. SHARE Photograph by Bryan Huynh Collective for TIME Kim, photographed in Los Angeles in December, will defend gold in Beijing Four years after becoming a breakout star, the snowboarding prodigy is bringing her full self to the Beijing OlympicsĪfter Chloe Kim returned home from the 2018 Olympics in South Korea, she put her gold medal in what felt at the time like the right place: a trash bin at her parents’ house.
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