Biography:
You know how people say that they are destined to perform, well do you know of a person who is destined to snowboard?
Born in Long Beach California on April 23, 2000, Chloe Kim won gold in the halfpipe with an extraordinary set of flips, twists, and jaw-dropping tricks in the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics (평창 동계 올림픽). Seems like snowboarding was her destiny and in the next few paragraphs, you might be able to sense it too. Chloe Kim started tightening her first bindings at the age of 4. Her dad, Jong Kim (김종진), introduced her to the sport only because he wanted a partner with who he could learn snowboarding with. Without realizing it, Chloe soon outpaced her dad. “When I learned how to turn, he was still struggling how to get off the chairlift,” she says fondly. “I wasn’t so sure about the sport when I first started, but as I went snowboarding more, and started progressing, I started to fall in love with it. I just think I had more fun snowboarding when I was able to go into the air and do spins and flips.” Chloe gets a lot of motivation from her parents, who emigrated from South Korea to California in the 1980s. “Watching my family work hard has been inspirational. I got their work ethic,” says Chloe.
Before entering kindergarten, Chloe was already hitting jumps and rails on the weekends. At the age of 6, she joined a competitive team at Mountain High Resort. Then, Just one year later, at the age of 7, she won Junior Nationals! When she was 8 years old, Chloe moved to Switzerland and lived with her aunt, so that she could learn French. This, however, didn’t stop her from loving snowboarding. Every weekend she would wake up at 4 a.m. and take two trains to a nearby resort that was across the border in France. There, she practiced on the halfpipe. It wasn’t what you saw every day, and Chloe knew that. She also knew that at an early age, she was determined to conquer the halfpipe even before she got her driver’s license. When Chloe moved back to California two years later, her dad quit his job to help her train on more challenging terrains. Every weekend, Chloe and her dad drove five and a half hours to Mammoth Mountain to train with the top coaches.
After years of hard work, training, and determination, in 2014, Chloe showed what she was made of at ESPN’s X Games. Coming in second behind 30-year-old superstar Kelly Clark, Chloe won silver and made history as the youngest person to earn a medal at the X Games. Can you believe that she was in eighth grade and was only 13 years old? For the next two years in a row, Chloe took home gold at the X-Games, becoming the only athlete in X-Games history to win three medals before the age of 16. Chloe would have qualified for the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia, but unfortunately, she couldn’t compete due to her age. In 2016, Chloe became the first female to score a perfect 100 in the superpipe at the U.S. Snowboarding Grand Prix.
Achievements:
Claimed to be the greatest female snowboarder of all time by the Olympic Channel, Chloe Kim is a five-time X Games champion and a PyeongChang 2018 snowboard halfpipe gold medalist.
The Olympic Channel defines snowboarding as a popular winter sport that resembles surfing, skiing, and skateboarding on snow. A snowboarder is strapped onto a single board that looks like a large skateboard and glides down snow-covered mountains. Snowboarders perform many of the same movements as Alpine and freestyle skiers. Kim’s specialty, a halfpipe, is a long, icy tube that snowboarders zigzag across, performing twists and turns in the air.
According to the Olympic Channel, Kim first took the public’s eye at only age 14 in the 2015 X Games. The X Games are an annual extreme sports event. There she was the youngest ever to win a gold medal, taking the prize in the superpipe ahead of Kelly Clark. The records continued to fall when she won the X Games’ gold medal again the next year and then becoming the first female border to land back-to-back 1080s – a rapid spinning maneuver that is one of the most difficult tricks to land – in the US Snowboard Grand Prix. At the end of January, she claimed her fifth X Games Superpipe crown out of six in Aspen and added her first world championship title in February.
Already qualified to win a gold medal, Kim, was too young to compete at the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games, therefore her first Olympic competition came at the Lillehammer 2016 Winter Youth Olympic Games. In Lillehammer, the snowboarder won two gold medals, making her a dual gold medalist for the snowboard halfpipe and slopestyle events. The Olympic Channel describes how Kim was far and away ahead of the competition, winning gold, notching the highest score in YOG snowboarding history, and acting as the US team flag bearer. She also commented about the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympic Games: “When I couldn’t make the team in Sochi due to my age-it felt like such a long journey. You know, going from 13 to 7 is such a big-time gap. But at the end of the day, I’m here and I’m happy.”
But she did not stop making history there! Kim landed back-to-back 1080s for the first time in February 2016. As the Olympic Channel reports, no other woman has ever landed back-to-back 1080s in competition with Kim. On her second run, Kim slipped as she tried to complete the second 1080. But on her victory lap, she nailed it in a close to perfect run which US Snowboard team head coach Rick Bower described as "the best run that she's ever done".
Besides her accomplishments out in the snow she also received three ESPY (Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly) awards - being named Best Female Athlete, Best Female Olympian, and Best Female Action Sports Athlete. The gold medallist has also been given her own Barbie doll, starred in many movies and music videos, and been on the cover of a Corn Flakes Cereal box. Kim was also one of four Olympians - the others being Adam Rippon, Kevin Durant, and Roger Federer - to make TIME's list of the 100 most influential people in 2018.
Fans cheered at the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympic Games as Chloe Kim won gold in the halfpipe, with a remarkable score of 98.25 points, ten points ahead of her nearest rival. This added another gold medal to her tally at the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympic Games. According to an Olympic Channel article, the victory was already assured for Kim with 93.75 points before the final run, Kim produced her most unbelievable run of the competition with back-to-back 1080s which awarded 98.25 points out of a possible 100 and beat Liu Jiayu, who came close with 89.75 on her second run, by almost 10 points. No one could break her 90 point barrier. She was the most talked-about snowboarder around the world and the youngest halfpipe gold medallist. Two years later, she tells reporters that she still cannot believe she had won in PyeongChang.
According to the Olympic Channel, just eight days later from winning the 2018 Winter Olympic Games, the gold medalist landed another halfpipe title at the US Grand Prix! That was not the only time in which she made history in the year 2018! In October the Olympic Channel reports, Chloe Kim became the first woman to land a frontside double cork 1080 while training in Switzerland.
After taking the 2019 and 2020 season off to study at Princeton University and recover from a broken ankle, Kim returned to the competition in Laax, Switzerland. In the women's semi-final at the 2021 Laax Open, Switzerland, Kim topped the standings with 94.00 points ahead.
As well as winning both World Cup competitions in the previous season, she has also contested in other events – Copper Mountain, Colorado, and last month in Laax, Switzerland- retained Kim her Dew Tour Superpipe title in December of 2020.
As Chloe Kim once said, “The one thing I learned is to just give everything a shot you don’t want to live in regret.”
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