Kim comes equipped with a bubbly personality — candid, eager and relatable — and a Korean heritage that makes her marketable at home and abroad. Oh, and she speaks English, French and Korean.
Kim, now 17, could emerge from these Olympics as a transcendent athlete — in the vein of a young Shaun White or Michael Phelps even — but she enters them already comfortable with who she is. Her Korean-born parents immigrated to Southern California more than 20 years ago, and she will have no shortage of extended family members gathering around the PyeongChang halfpipe. Despite her close ties to the host nation, Kim feels little internal struggle over cultural identity.
“I don’t know. It’s weird. I just grew up in the States, so I feel like I identify more with the American culture.”
Growing up
Raised in Southern California, Chloe is the youngest of three daughters and was all of 4 years old when she snowboarded for the first time. Her father, Jong Jin Kim, took her to Mountain High resort in the San Gabriel Mountains outside of Los Angeles.
“He wanted my mom to go with him,” she explained. “So he took me as bait.”
Kim showed promise on a snowboard early, entering her first competition at 6 and winning junior nationals a year later. Even when she moved to Switzerland for two years at age 8, she made regular treks to the Alps. She would wake up at 4 a.m., take two trains to reach a halfpipe in France and continue her training.
“It was kind of crazy now that I think about it,” she said with a laugh.
When she returned to the States, she joined a developmental program at Mammoth Mountain, and her potential started to come into focus. By then, the Olympics were a distant goal for the family, and Kim’s father quit his engineering job to help make it a reality.
“Obviously, when I was 8, I had no idea what he was doing,” Kim said. “It was, like, ‘Why is Dad home more?’ You know? But now that I think about it, you know, I feel like it was a really bold move, and I can’t believe my mom was okay with it.”
The Kims started home-schooling and doing online courses with their daughter in middle school, and every weekend Jong would drive 5½ hours from their home in La Palma to Mammoth so Kim could learn from the best. Their lives suddenly seemed to revolve around a dream, which Kim said startled some of their relatives back in Korea.
“I think at first it was a little hard for them to support it,” she said, “because, you know, I feel like a Korean’s ideal thing is their kid being, like, a lawyer, a doctor.”
A blossoming career
Anyone who saw her on the snow, though, understood. Kim was soon entering bigger competitions, steadily posting higher scores and drawing more attention along the way, from other competitors and potential sponsors.
“Chloe is one of the most talented young snowboarders I’d ever seen,” said Kelly Clark, who is heading to her fifth Winter Olympics. “I remember talking to Burton [a snowboard manufacturer] about her when I first saw her in Mammoth. I said, ‘Hey, I’ve never suggested that you pick up any athlete — except for this girl. This girl is someone you should sponsor and you should get behind. She has the potential to go very far.’ ”
The Sochi Games were not an option because the Olympics bar anyone younger than 15 from competing, but 2014 still marked the year Kim announced herself as one of the world’s best in the halfpipe, winning silver at the X Games at just 13.
It meant she had four years to prepare for her first Winter Games, and the Olympic world had four years to prepare for her.
Identity
Identity is always a curious thing at the Olympics, especially as nations increasingly recruit athletes from around the globe, sometimes with only tenuous ties to their country. That Jamaican bobsled team competing in PyeongChang? One member is from New Jersey. The Nigerian sled will feature women from Texas, Illinois and Minnesota. The South Koreans will field nearly 20 athletes from other countries, and about three dozen U.S.-born athletes will be representing other nations at these Olympics.
There’s little confusion for Kim, the chatty SoCal teen with blond highlights, active social media presence and unlimited athletic potential whom the world is about to meet.
“I always get the question, like, ‘Where are you from?’ L.A. ‘No, where are you really from?’ I was born in Long Beach. ‘No, no, like, where are you really, really from?’ ” she said. “. . . I always get that question. It’s never, like, my first answer would be, ‘I’m from Korea,’ or, like, ‘I’m Korean.’ It’s always, like, ‘I’m American.’ ”
For now, Kim seems unaffected by the expectations that might be accompanying her to PyeongChang.
She is still among the youngest competitors at most competition stops, and she will wrap up her final year of high school this spring. She is applying to colleges and knows the next phase of her life — with or without an Olympic medal — will be different.
When she is entering the pipe, she is not thinking about any of that, of course. She rides up the 22-foot-high wall, climbing and climbing, before launching into the air. Kim spins and she flips and, for what can feel like several seconds, she looks like even gravity can’t pull her back down to Earth.
For more information, go to the Winter Olympics TV schedule and highlights.
Feb. 10: Men’s slopestyle, 9:04 p.m. (NBCSN, 7-9:45 p.m.)
Feb. 11: Women’s slopestyle, 9:06 p.m. (NBC, 7-11 p.m.; NBCSN, 8-11:30 p.m.)
Feb. 12: Women’s halfpipe, 9 p.m. (NBC, 8-11:30 p.m.)
Feb. 13: Men’s halfpipe, 9:30 p.m. (NBC, 8-11:30 p.m.)
Feb. 15: Men’s snowboard cross, 12:45 a.m. (NBC, 12:05 a.m.-1:30 a.m.)
Feb. 15: Women’s snowboard cross, 10:56 p.m. (NBC, 8 p.m.-12:30 a.m.)
Feb. 22: Women’s big air, 10:30 p.m. (NBC, 8 p.m.-midnight)
Feb. 23: Men’s big air, 9 p.m. (NBC, 8-11 p.m.)
Feb. 23: Men’s and women’s parallel giant slalom, 10:58 p.m. (NBC, 11:35 p.m.-1 a.m.)
