Before Chasing Olympic History, Chloe Kim First Had to Find Peace

After more than a decade in snowboarding’s spotlight, the 25-year-old enters her third Olympics with a new perspective on what it means to love her sport—and herself.

Chloe Kim has picked out the date she will retire from snowboarding. She won’t reveal exactly when it will be, but says she’s had it in her mind for a really long time.

“I am 25 right now. I’d love to start a family. My mom had me when she was young. I’d love to be a young mom,” she says. “My dad’s 70 right now. There’s so much time, but also not enough time.” 

A two-time Olympic gold medalist and three-time world champion, Kim speaks like somebody who has checked off her entire to-do list—even the retirement speech: “I’ve won every single competition multiple times—some multiple, multiple, multiple times. I’ve done tricks that I never thought I’d be able to do. I have done so much here. I’m really happy and I’m fulfilled.”

Athletes are so famously bad at walking away that every unretirement announcement should begin, “I am a cliché.” Leaving is hard for a host of reasons. Even the oldest pro athletes would be considered young in almost any other field; they want to keep working. Then there is the final-scene conundrum: They don’t want to go out with a bad performance, but if they are performing well, why retire?

Besides, who can give up that life? The adrenaline rush of competition, private jets and VIP access, cheers in the arena and recognition everywhere else … it’s one high after another. Every month, it seems, an athlete announces their retirement, with fans not even realizing they were still playing—because they weren’t. They just hung onto the idea they might play for a year or two after their last game.

Kohjiro Kinno/Sports Illustrated; Styling by Sydney Lopez at The Wall Group; Hair by Kiley Fitzgerald at A-Frame; Makeup by Mai Quynh at Forward Artists

Yet here is one of the best snowboarders in history, still in her prime, two months before heading to Italy for her third Olympics, saying she knows when she will retire, and she will not waver. (Kim’s Olympic preparation got an added wrinkle: Just five weeks out from the Games, she announced she dislocated her shoulder and was waiting for clarity on if she would be able to compete in Italy.)

“Once I set my mind to something, then that’s that,” she says, “and that’s how it’s gonna be.”

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Chloe Kim is sleeping in an airport. She is 10 or 11 years old, and she knows the deal by now. When she travels for a snowboarding competition, she and her father, Jong Jin Kim, buy cheap standby plane tickets; sometimes they get seats right away, but sometimes they have to wait a long while. People who can’t afford regular seats on the plane don’t spend money on hotel rooms. So the Kims sleep in the airport, sometimes for two or three nights in a row. 

The travel arrangements, the homeschooling, the early morning wake-up calls to make the hourslong drive to practice every weekend—it was all part of the plan to make snowboarding a full-time career. And it didn’t take long for it to happen. 

As an eighth-grader at the 2014 Winter X Games in Aspen, Colo., a 13-year-old Kim challenged 30-year-old star Kelly Clark with her big-time tricks, namely a frontside 900, to come within 0.67 points of the superpipe crown. Kim won silver, becoming the youngest medalist in the event’s history. She actually qualified for the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, but she was two years too young to meet the Olympic snowboarding age requirement. 

After that, things happened fast: Kim became such a prodigy that she made six figures in a niche sport before she reached high school. She turned everything upside down with ease: herself, her sport and even the American dream. Her parents emigrated from South Korea in search of a better life, and she made it happen for them. 

At age 13, her father sat her down and explained the difference between spending and investing, and not long after, Chloe bought her first piece of real estate: a condo near Mammoth Mountain in California.

Chloe Kim could become the first snowboarder to win three consecutive Olympic gold medals in the halfpipe. | Tom Lovelock/Sports Illustrated

She never attended high school. She enrolled at Mammoth High, with plans to attend classes in person when she was in town, but she was never there. She was homeschooled from middle school. Every year, she traveled up to Mammoth from her family’s home in Torrance, Calif., when the snow hit, usually in November, to start training. The halfpipe was built around Thanksgiving. She would travel to competitions all winter; take a week off; go back to Mammoth for spring camp; take another week off; spend a month at Mount Hood in Oregon … and then go to New Zealand for a month or two, and Switzerland for a month and a half, and suddenly, it was almost November again. 

It was a lot for a young teenager, but she loved it. Didn’t she love it? 

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Chloe Kim can’t see. It’s 2019. Yesterday, she had 20/20 vision. But she woke up today and everything was a little blurry. She starts to panic. She thinks she must be dehydrated, and so she has someone come give her intravenous fluids, but after those kick in, she still can’t see—not like she did the day before. She wishes she had taken advantage of her last day with clear vision. 

She thinks to herself: If I knew what would happen, I would have done so much more the day before. Or I wouldn’t have gone to sleep that night. Maybe it was the sleep that got me.

A year before, in PyeongChang at age 17, she dominated her first Olympics, becoming the first woman to land back-to-back 1080s at the Winter Games. In her celebratory press conference, she said, “This is the best outcome I could ever ask for … just going home with the gold is amazing.” 

Then she went home as a sudden celebrity—she embarked on a media tour, graced the cover of Sports Illustrated with her dog, Reese, and was even honored with her own Barbie doll—and soon fell into a deep depression. The 2018 Olympics outcome was not an outcome at all; for Kim, it felt like a day that refused to end. She wanted to be satisfied, but she wasn’t. She didn’t want strangers to recognize her, but they did. She would sleep for 10 hours and wake up exhausted, with no desire to go outside. But she was restless, so she went outside anyway.

About a year after the PyeongChang Games, in March 2019, Kim fractured her ankle during the halfpipe finals at the Burton U.S. Open. The injury required surgery and forced her out of competition for the season—a compulsory pause in her career that eventually led to a voluntary one. That fall, Kim enrolled in Princeton and stepped away from snowboarding for about 22 months before returning in January 2021.

When she was just 17 years old, Kim won her first Olympic gold medal in PyeongChang. | Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated

Despite the break from competition, her vision never improved. She hoped it would get better, but she didn’t try to fix it. She told herself she was a lousy candidate for contact lenses because of her dry-eye syndrome.

Night competitions, a snowboarding staple, became a challenge: “When I’m competing in the dark with all the lights,” she says now, “it feels like I’m at the club.” Her coach, Rick Bower, thinks it affects her more on overcast days when the sun is bright. 

But she says snowboarders don’t need to see everything perfectly: “As long as I have an idea of what’s what I’m looking at, I think I’m good.” 

And that’s that.

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Chloe Kim is not worried about pressure, O.K.? She acts like it does not exist. She is the best snowboarder in the world, and today, at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, she walks out for her last practice before the final, and that’s when she loses it.

She is shocked. Her coach is not. Bower has coached less famous Olympians who denied there was pressure until it became undeniable, and Kim competes in a stratosphere where gold is assumed. 

She falls on the last two of her three runs in the final, but her first one is good enough to win halfpipe gold, the second of her Olympic career. A relieved Kim cracks jokes in her press conference and admits to a little doubt, but she says has been prioritizing her mental health. She wants little girls who watch her “to learn that it’s O.K. to have a bad day.” Then she goes home and has a slew of them.

“I hated myself,” she says now. “I was so angry at everything. I wasn’t treating the people in my life right. I just wasn’t the person I wanted to be. I was not good. Difficult, disrespectful—all of it.”

Despite falling on two of her three runs, Kim won halfpipe gold in Beijing in 2022. | Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated

At the time, people closer to her suggested she find a therapist, and it infuriated her.

“I’m pissed because it’s like, people that I’m working with that are telling me this stuff, you know?” she says. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, I probably do need therapy, but I need therapy because of you. Because you’re making me busy, and you’re not giving me time, and you’re not prioritizing my rest, and you just want to make money.’ I hated that. I hated that idea.”

In the summer of 2024, after dabbling in therapy for years without much improvement, Kim fully committed to it: “Intensive therapy,” she says, “and I feel so much better now.” Today, she can make sense of what happened in 2018 and ’22—and of her other 23 years on Earth as well.

“The minute you don’t let a kid be a kid, that’s when they’re not gonna be happy. The minute I started feeling more responsible financially for my family and whatnot, that’s kind of when the pressure started to build,” she says. “When it started to become rewarding, and I started to be on programs and win all these medals, it got even more extreme. I was like, O.K., well, I have to do all these things.”

Ah, but she loved it. Didn’t she love it?

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Chloe Kim sits on a couch and starts talking. Los Angeles, December 2025: She was just in Utah for a video shoot, and now it’s an SI interview and photo shoot, and she is having a bad allergy day, and she is “not, like, super fond of public speaking … I don’t think I could ever see myself doing a TED talk.” Twenty minutes into the interview, she realizes that she is still wearing her sunglasses.

“I’m sorry, I forgot I had these on,” she says. “I was like, Why is it so dark?”

She removes the shades. Her eyes hold the first clues that she has already gotten started on the rest of her life: contact lenses.

“Today is actually my first day trying them out,” she says. “So far, so good. [But] I think my right one might be inside out.”

After waking up that day in 2019 with blurry vision, Kim refused to address the issue for years, viewing it as another annoying thing she didn’t want to happen. She was eventually diagnosed with an astigmatism—a common, easily treatable issue—and finally realized that dealing with it was something she should do, for herself. She learned that dry-eye syndrome was not the obstacle she imagined: The first time she tried to wear contacts, she put them in with ease.

Kim shared that she has started wearing contacts to address a vision issue. | Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

Kim also recently discovered that she has attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, but again, she refused to face it and deal with all of the ways it impacts her life and snowboarding career. The ADHD is why, according to Bower, she has “no cruising days, no mellow days. They are all very intense.” And it is why she is constantly looking for new tricks. 

“She doesn’t go out there and waste a moment on the snow,” Bower says. If Kim takes too long to perfect a trick, she gets annoyed. When she does perfect it, she pushes to add another. “She honestly is bored unless she’s doing the most demanding thing she can,” he adds.

Even away from snowboarding, Kim says her ADHD is “debilitating.” She loves to visit art museums but: “Next thing you know,” she says, “it’s been five hours, and I’m like, What did I see again? I don’t remember.” She reads pages of a book at a time on autopilot: “I get distracted, or I really get sucked into this story, and then I forget what happened.” 

She is doing what her brain wants, but not necessarily what she wants. For years, she really wanted to train less but she told her herself: This is what everyone else is doing. She set out to win snowboarding competitions. She inadvertently created a world she cannot escape. 

All the while, she worries that snowboarding will wreck her body.

“My sport is dangerous. People have died. People have had terrible injuries that have, you know, taken away from their quality of life,” she says. “I’m always afraid of CTE. Every time I hit my head, it scares me.”

Her coach says: “Fear gets in the way of a lot of people. She’s as close to fearless as you can be. She is not afraid to do anything.”

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Chloe Kim is a wealthy, wildly successful 25-year-old. She has a million Instagram followers and her own line of snowboarding gear and full portfolio of endorsements, and her dating life is news (in late 2025, she went public with Cleveland Browns star Myles Garrett). But she still wonders what it would’ve been like to have her own locker in a high school, or to go to prom. 

“I wouldn’t call myself a celebrity. I never will,” she says. “I literally snowboard. Like, whatever.”

She says her retirement date gives her “a lot of peace.”

Now 25 years old, Kim says she already has a retirement date in mind. | Kohjiro Kinno/Sports Illustrated; Jacket by Dunst; Tank by Skims; Shorts by The Frankie Shop; Tights by Wolford; Boots by Schutz

Perhaps it has also given Kim a clear vision as she pursues history at the Milan Cortina Games, where she will attempt to become the first athlete to win three consecutive Olympic gold medals in the halfpipe. 

Does she still love it? Yes, she says, which means she loved it in the first place. Maybe that is why she mastered unprecedented tricks at great risk to her health, and why she executed them under pressure: As she lost control of her world outside the halfpipe, she clung like hell to what was still hers inside it. She’s as close to fearless as you can be.

“The drive and the determination,” she says, “I think that’s what always made me feel alive.”

The first time Kim went to the Olympics, she won gold and felt miserable. The next time, she felt miserable and won gold. Whatever happens in Milan Cortina, she will leave knowing how to not be miserable. That’s that—the best outcome she could ask for, and that’s how it’s gonna be.       

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