11 min readChloe Kim was in the final minutes of warm-up at the 2015 Winter X Games when she chose to squeeze in one more practice run. The 14-year-old was having too much fun to stop. But on her final trick, something felt off. As she landed, her board hit the top of the pipe and she cartwheeled through the air, sliding down the rest of the slope on her back, her neon-yellow jacket and violet snow pants popping against the snow.
“I’m bleeding; my face is scraped up. It was very intense,” Kim, now 25, tells me of the nasty fall. She remembers the fear sinking in: “Oh my God, I can’t compete.” She chipped a tooth and was examined for a possible concussion, but ultimately she was deemed healthy to proceed. So she went back out there, with a bandage on her left cheek and a red bruise above her lip. On her first attempt, still shaken, she played it safe. But on her second run, she faced her fear and stuck the landing. And that’s how Kim won her first gold medal at the Winter X Games. At the time, she was the youngest athlete ever to do so.
“Damn, I was such a badass,” Kim says with a sigh when we meet in New York over a decade later. “Now I’m like a grumpy grandma.” She may no longer be a newcomer, but she has two Olympic gold medals, is tied with Shaun White for the most X Games superpipe gold medals, and continues to push the boundaries of her sport and the laws of physics. Still, after all her victories, Kim believes “my biggest accomplishment is always being able to get back up and try again.”
She found herself in a similar situation in January, when she fell during practice, just a month before the 2026 Winter Games. Kim dislocated her shoulder and tore her labrum (a piece of cartilage in the shoulder socket), which kept her indoors for days. But as she shared in an Instagram Reel a few days later, “I will be good to go for the Olympics”—she’ll just have to wear “a really sexy shoulder brace,” she added with a laugh. But as she recovers, she won’t be able to snowboard until “right before” the Games, which means losing a lot of practice time. In the meantime, she’ll try to distract herself on the ground with the help of “my man,” as she called her boyfriend, NFL player Myles Garrett. “Every season I’m met with a different set of challenges, so I guess this is going to be the one this year,” she said in the video.
In February, when she’s back on the slopes, the world will watch her try again for Olympic gold. If she wins, she’ll become the first person ever to win three back-to-back snowboard halfpipe gold medals. As the number-one-ranked women’s halfpipe snowboarder in the world, she clinched a spot on Team USA back in April 2025. But when we meet one November afternoon in the lobby of her sleek Manhattan hotel, before her pre-Olympic training kicks into high gear, and months before her bad fall, Kim’s main focus is herself.
Chloe Kim, photographed in Saas-Fee, a resort village in the Swiss Alps near the Italian border. Coat, ski suit, turtleneck, scarf, Moncler Grenoble.
She arrives looking cozy in a black sweatshirt and sweatpants, her hair in a casual bun. She orders herself a pot of mint tea. “I’m just trying to be as happy as possible, whatever that looks like,” she says, which might mean “being a little selfish and making it all about me.” Some days that’s going home to “rot on my couch,” on others, it’s going to the spa or eating solo at a restaurant. Because she knows that once the Olympic grind is in full swing, she won’t be able to do any of those things anymore.
Kim is a beast in competition. She zigzags down the course, soaring about a dozen feet in the air, creating magic. “Chloe’s got several tricks that only one or two other athletes are doing,” her coach of over 10 years, Rick Bower, tells me. “She’s definitely the woman to beat out there.”
At the Olympics, she’ll first compete in the women’s halfpipe qualifications before advancing to the finals, where she’ll have three runs to earn gold. “That’s less than two minutes total,” Kim notes. “When I’m training, it’s hours and hours and days and months and years that I put into that moment. As long as I know I did my best and there’s nothing I could have done to do better, then that’s pretty damn successful to me.”
Sweater, hat, Moncler Grenoble.
Kim, who grew up in Orange County, California, started snowboarding when she was 4 years old. Her dad, Jong, had wanted to try it out, but his wife, Boran, wasn’t interested, so he brought along his very active daughter (the youngest of three). When she was 5, a coach approached them, asking if she wanted to join the team the following year at Mountain High, Southern California’s closest winter resort. Jong saw his daughter’s potential and invested in it. He put her in high-diving classes to get familiar with being airborne, and skateboarding so she could practice in the summer months. He unofficially coached her based on videos he watched of Shaun White and other snowboarders online, eventually quitting his job as an engineer to support her training full-time. Jong, who moved from Korea to the U.S. when he was 26, took the risk because, he says, “I know that I cannot be a billionaire. So why don’t I make my daughter (get on the) US Olympic team? As an immigrant, that’s one of the American dreams.”
“My biggest accomplishment is always being able to get back up and try again.”
Though it wasn’t her idea, Kim grew to love snowboarding because of the adrenaline rush—and because she was winning. “When I started doing really well in competitions when I was 13, I was like, ‘Okay, this is awesome,’” she says. She qualified for the Sochi 2014 Olympics, but she was too young.
Her snowboarding career required sacrifices from the whole family. Jong would drive her to Mammoth Mountain every weekend, six hours each way. Boran’s job at Korean Air helped them travel, but it meant flying standby, and they often ended up sleeping at the airport. When Kim was finally able to buy a seat on the plane, she felt rich.
Kim signed her first major brand contract, a deal with Monster Energy, when she was 13, making her family more financially comfortable. When she was 16, Boran was able to retire. “I’m not saying that that’s why I love snowboarding, for the money,” Kim explains, but “I realized that I was fortunate to be able to do something that was not really conventional, and be successful at it, and get to live the most awesome life, too.” Skeptics didn’t understand it at first. “I’ve had so many people in my life tell my parents that maybe I shouldn’t be doing this, that I am wasting my life and youth away on something that won’t amount to anything,” she says, adding with a laugh, “Here I am now, bitches.”
Sweater, pants, hat, belt, hand warmer, Moncler Grenoble.
Chasing their American dream came with its struggles. Growing up in a gated Korean community, Kim felt a “cultural disconnect” from her American peers. She laughs as she recalls a dinner at a teammate’s house, when she didn’t know what to do with her plate after eating because she’d never used a dishwasher. “I remember waiting for everyone to go into the other room, and scrubbing the dish real quick and putting it back,” she says. She rarely encountered other Asian American snowboarders. When she won her first X Games gold at 14, around the time she first joined Instagram, she says she received “very racist, very hateful” comments. “It made me feel so terrible. It made me feel like my looks were more important than what I had just accomplished,” she says. “As a young girl, that’s incredibly detrimental to my body image, my identity, everything. Growing up, I was so insecure about speaking Korean with my dad because I just hated that I was Asian and the way that I was being perceived by others. I had essentially allowed public opinion to win in my eyes. I had never experienced hate in that way. So it was difficult.” The more she won, the worse the comments got. By 16, she says, “I was winning everything, and I felt like people wanted to take away from my talent and my hard work, and not give me the credit I deserved. I was foolish enough to believe them, too.” It took a long time for her to heal. “Now I don’t care,” she says. “Say what you want.”
“I’ve had so many people tell my parents…that I’m wasting my youth. Here I am now, bitches.”
Kim hopes other Asian American girls who follow in her footsteps will have a better experience, like 19-year-old Olympic hopeful Bea Kim. “I’m glad that I had to deal with that so she doesn’t have to, or doesn’t have to experience it to the extent that I have. And I hope she can carry on in her career with all the confidence, and do even greater things than me,” Kim says.
Bea Kim was in the crowd in PyeongChang when Kim won her first Olympic gold medal. “Watching Chloe, who looked like me, being able to perform at the highest level, and everyone respected her for what she did, regardless of what she looked like, it just meant the world,” she says. Kim herself remembers only flashes of her win at the 2018 Olympics—an American flag being thrust into her hands, breaking down at the sight of her parents. Her whole life would change after that day. She started getting recognized in public; people would ask her to take photos. It was “so overstimulating,” she says. Before long, the frenzy took a toll on her mental health. “I actually spiraled into a deep depression after, and I resented winning because it took away something that I wasn’t ready to give up, which was my sense of privacy,” she says. She would’ve loved to celebrate in silence or on vacation with her family. “But that all kind of got taken away,” she adds.
Ski suit, ski goggles, pouch, Moncler Grenoble.
In the 2019–20 season, Kim took a hiatus to go to Princeton University. The plan was to attend for one year before training for the Olympics again, but in her second semester, COVID-19 struck. She and her classmates were sent home before midterms. She eventually went on to win another gold at the 2022 Beijing Games, but it didn’t feel the same. “That one was just—I don’t even count it, honestly,” she says. “I mean, I love that I got an Olympic medal, but, again…it’s really about knowing that you did everything you could and feeling your best. And I wasn’t in that position.”
She explains, “COVID definitely took a toll on me mentally. My body was in such bad shape, because it was so hard to find a routine.” The pandemic made it difficult to work out, go outside, and of course travel. “It was a rough go. So I feel like in ’22, I was just excited to get home and be done.” She took another break from competing from 2022 to 2023 to focus on her mental health. As she later told fans, she “strongly considered retirement.”
During that time, Kim tells me, she was “so burned out and exhausted and in so much pain that I was like, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I don’t feel good. And I’m miserable.’ I’d just won another Olympic gold medal, and I didn’t feel fulfilled.” But she didn’t want to make any impulsive decisions. She went to fashion shows, museums, and art galleries. She even dabbled in acting. “I wanted to try a bunch of stuff, because when you do something for so long, it’s easy to get trapped in that bubble,” she says. Once she started investing in other parts of herself, she started to miss snowboarding. “I went on a training trip and had so much fun, and I was like, ‘Okay, I don’t think I’m quite done yet.’”
Jacket, sweater, ski pants, hat, belt, boots, Moncler Grenoble.
Fun is key for Kim this time around. Before, “I was such a negative, what-if person, like, ‘What if I fall and I hurt myself?’” she says. She worked to reframe her thoughts: “‘I’m really good at this, and when I do get it, it’s going to be freaking awesome. So why not just go for it?’” Now, heading into another Olympics, she’s in a much better place. “I’m therapized as hell now,” Kim says. “I’ve been going intensively for almost two years.” Mental health is also a big part of her training, Coach Bower says. “There are certain days when it’s appropriate to really push and meet that challenge head on, and other days when you need to step back and take a look at the big picture,” he says.
“I am so excited for whatever the next chapter of my life looks like.”
Kim has become a vocal advocate for mental health. She’s not a big fan of social media, but she’s using her platform to be transparent about her struggles—with a sense of humor. After winning the Halfpipe World Championship in 2025, she mentioned on Instagram that she had a “cute lil menty b (mental breakdown) during practice.” In one video, she ranks some of her biggest wipeouts on the halfpipe. She even posted footage of the fall that dislocated her shoulder when she announced the news of her injury to her followers. “When we talk about sports, we’re always celebrating people’s success. But then when you zoom out and look at the career as a whole, that’s such a small fraction of everything else that person has endured,” Kim says. “I wanted to try to be more open about my experiences and how it’s not all pretty and dandy all the time, and that it actually does suck sometimes.” In the spirit of transparency, Kim is currently shooting a documentary that’ll give an inside look at her life on and off the halfpipe. In a statement, she described the film as “a culmination of my career as a professional athlete, but it’s also about everything that exists beyond the competition.”
She’s part of a generation of women athletes who are being more open about their mental health in the spotlight, like Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka. “I am really grateful for their courage opening up in that way, because it allowed us to have a bigger conversation,” she says. “Did they get scrutinized? Absolutely. They got so mistreated for being open about something that’s so valid and real.”
Coat, ski suit, turtleneck, sunglasses, scarf, Moncler Grenoble.
Kim knows she won’t be snowboarding forever. “I do think that I won’t be doing it for much longer,” she says. She has aspirations outside of Olympic glory, like having a family. “I love my relationship with my mom, and I want this with my kids. I am always juggling two dreams of mine. I love snowboarding. I love how challenging it is and how much it pushes me as an athlete and as a person. But there is a chance that if I do too much and I keep going for too long, it might take away the possibility of me being able to have a family. What if I get injured? What if something devastating happens?
“I am so excited for whatever the next chapter of my life looks like,” Kim says, “so I’m going to enjoy every moment of this.” Whatever she does next “will have to come from a really genuine, passionate place,” she adds. “I don’t think I can learn to love something the way I did with snowboarding.”
And what if Kim’s kids want to be snowboarders? “Hell, no,” she says, shaking her head. “Hell, no.” But then she pauses and reconsiders. “I don’t think I could say no to a small child who has big dreams,” she admits. “I would hope they don’t, because I would like to enjoy the mountains and not be stressed when I’m there, worrying about my kid.”
Regardless, she expects to go on some fun snowboarding trips with her family and prove she’s a cool mom. She could even feel that familiar urge to try again. “Maybe I’ll whip out some tricks for them and be like, ‘I’ve still got it.’ Next thing you know, I’m 45 and I want to go back to the Olympics. Honestly, if it’s possible, I might be game.”
Lead image: Sweater, pants, hat, Moncler Grenoble.
Hair by Erisson Musella and makeup by Luca Cianciolo, both at Blend Management; produced by Ben Freedman at Picture Farm; special thanks to The Capra, Saas-Fee, Switzerland.
A version of this story appears in the February 2026 issue of ELLE.
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