Chloe Kim

Chloe Kim (born April 23, 2000, Long Beach, California, U.S.) is an American snowboarder who won an Olympic gold medal in the halfpipe event in 2018. At age 17, she was the youngest woman in Olympic history to earn a gold medal in the event. She won a second consecutive gold medal in the halfpipe four years later, becoming the first woman to achieve that feat.

(Read Gold-medalist Torah Bright’s Britannica’s entry on snowboarding.)

Kim’s parents were both Korean immigrants to the United States. Encouraged by her father, Kim began snowboarding at age four at a ski resort in California’s San Gabriel Mountains. She started snowboarding competitively soon thereafter. Between ages 8 and 10, she lived with an aunt in Switzerland, where she trained regularly in the Alps. After returning to California, Kim joined a developmental team and continued to progress in her sport. In 2014 she made her debut at the X Games, one of the main venues for international snowboarding competition. Though she was only 13 years old at the time, she won a silver medal in the superpipe competition. Kim was the youngest competitor ever to garner a medal at the X Games.

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A rule that Olympic participants in snowboarding must be at least 15 years of age prevented Kim from competing at the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia. Over the next several years, however, she established herself as a major force in the sport. In 2015 she won the superpipe title at the X Games in Aspen, Colorado. The following year she captured gold in the superpipe at both the X Games in Aspen and the X Games in Oslo. She also won gold medals in the halfpipe and slopestyle at the 2016 Winter Youth Olympic Games in Lillehammer, Norway. Kim finished atop the Fédération Internationale de Ski (FIS) World Cup halfpipe rankings for the 2017 season.

Kim again won the X Games superpipe title in Aspen in January 2018. A month later, she entered the 2018 Winter Olympics in P’yŏngch’ang (Pyeongchang), South Korea, as the strong favourite to win the halfpipe gold medal. Kim easily advanced to the halfpipe finals, during which she immediately took a commanding lead with a score of 93.75 on the first of her three runs in the competition. She fell during her second run. However, her nearest opponent—Liu Jiayu of China—could not overtake her and eventually claimed the silver medal with a score of 89.75. Having already clinched the gold, Kim pushed her own score to 98.25 with a spectacular final run that included two consecutive 1,080° jumps (three full turns in the air). She was the first woman to land back-to-back 1,080° jumps in Olympic competition.

Kim successfully defended her X Games superpipe title in Aspen in 2019. She subsequently took a break from competition and entered Princeton University. Kim later took a leave of absence from Princeton and returned full-time to snowboarding. Competing again in Aspen in 2021, she claimed her sixth X Games superpipe gold medal. At the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, Kim continued her dominance. Her first run in the halfpipe finals included two cleanly executed 1,080° jumps and gave her what turned out to be an insurmountable score of 94. With a comfortable lead, she used her second and third runs to attempt a 1,260° jump (three and a half revolutions)—something no female snowboarder had ever landed in a halfpipe contest. Though she fell on those attempts, her first-run score was more than enough to earn her the gold. Kim finished well ahead of silver medalist Queralt Castellet of Spain (90.25 points) and bronze medalist Sena Tomita of Japan (88.25).