Chloe Kim makes flying through the air look easy.
But before she left for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, looking to repeat as gold medalist in the women's halfpipe, the decorated snowboarder wanted everyone oohing and aahing over her athletic skills to know that just putting one foot in front of the other on the ground can be really hard.
"I hated life," the 21-year-old recalled to TIME earlier this year of returning home after the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, and not feeling at all like the hometown hero she was being hailed as.
So much so that she took her gold medal and tossed it in the trash at her family's house in Orange County, Calif.
Her first-place prize was soon retrieved from the bin, but while Kim—a media darling during the Games thanks to her infectious smile, inspiring story and low-key, hey-I'm-just-having-a-blast-out-there approach to her sport—just wanted to do regular stuff during her downtime, she quickly found that other people weren't necessarily on the same page.
"The minute I come home, I can't even go to my goddamn favorite place," she told TIME, recounting an uncomfortable attempt to grab lunch at a casual café with a case of bedhead and all the staring that ensued. "It makes you angry. I just wanted a day where I was left alone. And it's impossible. And I appreciate that everyone loves and supports me, but I just wish people could understand what I was going through up to that point. Everyone was like, 'I just met her, and she's such a bitch.' I'm not a bitch. I just had the most exhausting two months of my life, and the minute I get home I'm getting hassled. I just want to get my f--king ham and cheese sandwich and go."
And it wasn't only people craning their necks, snapping pics with their phones and thinking they could approach her at any time that made her feel the weight of her new world on her shoulders.
Though she exuded matter-of-fact self-confidence—"I take my stuff seriously," she told Sports Illustrated before winning gold in 2018. "If you have the nerve to give me the orange Starburst, I will cut you. If you give me fro-yo without mangoes, you're dead to me. If you say that Hawaiian pizza is gross, we're done"—and longtime supporters marveled at her poise, that next level of fame started to screw with her.
"I felt pressured to be perfect all the time, and it drained me," Kim told Shape last fall. "I was genuinely angry for a while because I was so concerned about what everyone else would think about me."
Ultimately, "It became toxic," she said. "That's when I realized, I need to take better care of myself, and if I don't want to do something, I can't force myself to do it. It was very empowering for me, feeling like I finally had more control over my life. Right now, I'm in a much better place."
Kim, who rather ironically also hates being cold, was already a burgeoning legend within the winter sports community when she made her Olympics debut at 17 years old: She was 4 when her father, Jong Jin Kim, first took her to SoCal ski resort Mountain High to try snowboarding, which he enjoyed as a hobby. The pros at Mammoth Mountain pegged her as a natural at 6, she went pro at 12 and was the first athlete, male or female, to have three X Games gold medals by the age of 16. In 2016 she was the first woman to land back-to-back 1080s (two triple rotations, one on each side of the halfpipe) in competition, a feat she repeated at her first Olympics.
"I missed out on a few proms, homecomings, might miss my graduation," Kim, who also qualified for the 2014 Sochi Olympics but at 13 was too young for the team, told ABC News after topping the podium in Pyeongchang. "I wouldn't want it any other way...it's worth it." Still having the spring of her senior year ahead of her, she added, "I will try to go to prom, find me a boy."
Superior athleticism and having already starred in a Super Bowl commercial aside, Kim was a normal teenager who liked Riverdale, shopping at the mall, snacking and experimenting with different hair colors. Also, she told ABC, "I want to go home because my dog is at home and I'd do anything for my dog." Plus, she added, "It will be nice to just chill a little bit."
And, admittedly, some parts of being famous were awesome. Michael Keaton texted her congratulations. Frances McDormand gave her a shout-out during her Best Actress Oscar speech, comparing her experience to what "Chloe Kim must have felt like after doing back-to-back 1080s in the Olympic halfpipe." She rapped with G-Eazy at a party following the 2018 ESPYs, where she was named Female Athlete of the Year.
Her years of success also financed her "dope-ass" Prius and she was already starting to invest in real estate while still in high school.
But as Kim has since revealed, the pressure she put on herself was unsustainable, and not long after fracturing her ankle at the 2019 U.S. Open in Vail, Colo.—she still came in second, though it put a halt to a streak of eight first-place finishes—she decided she needed a real break.
"I felt a little lost," she told TIME. "I was in a pretty low, dark place."
Later that year, she decided to hit pause on her career for a season so she could enjoy student life as a freshman at Princeton, one of her dream schools.
"It was a really tough decision for me to make because I love snowboarding and I love competing, but I've been doing it for my whole life pretty much," Kim explained in an October 2019 YouTube video.
"I don't hate competing whatsoever," she quickly added, "I love it so much. But at the same time, I kind of wanted to explore life outside of that scene for a year." (All the while, the teen was still mostly beaming from ear to ear, that infectious smile of course part of the reason why it was just so darn easy for the world to root for her.)
Which didn't mean she wouldn't snowboard at all, Kim continued. She'd still go to the snow with family and friends. Rather, she emphasized, she just wasn't going to compete for a year.
"I don't want anyone to think I'm about to retire or anything like that," she shared. "I just need some Chloe time."
Spoiler alert: Even her fellow Tigers wanted selfies, and trying to explain to her fellow co-eds why she didn't want to be plastered all over their Instagram feeds didn't always go over well.
"And I was like, 'I don't want to be here as the snowboarder. I want to be here as a student. I want to be like everyone else. I want to be normal,'" she told TIME. "That's why I came here. And I was like, 'No, you can't get a photo with me. I don't want this to be a thing, because it's going to make me uncomfortable.' And immediately after that, everyone was like, 'Oh, she's such a bitch. Blah blah blah.'"
But she did make friends (many of whom didn't know who she was when they first met) and she admitted to TIME that she kind of enjoyed the part where she saw just how stressed all the kids on campus seemed to be, straining under the weight of their course loads and other activities. "It was just like, 'I need this. I need to see other amazing people fall apart,'" she explained.
Kim also started therapy to help her cope, and credited it with helping her feel more comfortable opening up and communicating her feelings to the people in her life. Talking to Shape, she applauded fellow Olympians Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka for speaking out so candidly last year about their own mental health struggles—especially amid the criticism they received for taking a timeout for themselves.
"It's important to slow down, take a step back, and validate your emotions," Kim explained. "Respecting yourself is so important."
Over the past few years, she has also reconsidered her role as a public figure and whether she owes it to people (including herself) to open up about issues that concern her—a conundrum many of her fellow athletes have had to grapple with amid rampant political and social unrest.
The daughter of Korean immigrants, Kim—who speaks the language and had visited South Korea before on multiple occasions—was celebrated in Pyeongchang upon arrival, her heritage a source of great pride to the local crowd.
"It's so cool being here," she told reporters during the Games. "Competing in my first Olympics in the country where my parents came from is insane.
Back in the U.S., however, Kim had experienced the trolling trifecta, being Asian-American, a girl and really young in a predominantly white dude's sport. Even winning a gold medal for her country didn't stop the hateful posts on social media or the occasional jerk on the street (or woman in the elevator at her own apartment building) from making a comment. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, there's also been a reported rise in hate crimes against Asians—a sad state of affairs that made Kim concerned for her family's safety, but also emboldened her to speak out.
"Just because I am a professional athlete or won the Olympics doesn't exempt me from racism," Kim told ESPN last April. "I get hundreds of those kinds of messages monthly. I see maybe 30 a day." (On the flip side of the trolling coin, she also said she was getting comments from "a lot of white people telling me they were upset at my silence.")
When she started winning medals at 13, so began the ignorant comments telling her to go back to China to let the American girls have the sport to themselves, Kim recalled. She said she stopped speaking Korean outside the house, "I was so ashamed and hated that I was Asian." Since then, "I've learned to get over that feeling, and now I am so proud."
But the pandemic definitely made the looming threat of abuse worse. "I never go anywhere by myself unless it's for a quick appointment or I know the place is crowded," she told ESPN. "I have Tasers, pepper spray, a knife. If I go outside to walk my dog or go to the grocery store, my fanny pack has all three of those in it and my hand never leaves my side."
And while social media could still be a place for good sometimes, "I don't look at my messages much anymore," Kim said. "Even if you get thousands of supportive messages, the hateful one will hit you the most."
Less than a year later, though, Kim is back at the top of her game and has zero time and energy to waste on her haters. She has also joined forces with swimmer Simone Manuel, WNBA star Sue Bird and soccer champ Alex Morgan—all fellow Olympic gold medalists—to found TOGETHXR, an original content hub highlighting women in sports.
"I guess I would tell my younger self that even though things get hard and people are mean to you or whatever, it'll get better and you're going to realize that you have so much good happening in your life, that the bad isn't going to hurt you," she told TIME. "It's just annoying. It's like an annoying mosquito in the background, just flying around."
And she was "so excited" to show off what she's been working on in Beijing, where the defense of her halfpipe title gets underway Wednesday, Feb. 9 (but still Feb. 8 in the U.S. at 5:30 p.m. PT/8:30 ET), at Genting Snow Park.
After what turned out to be a longer than expected break from competition due to the pandemic, she's on a six-event winning streak dating back to the 2021 Laax Open in Switzerland, her sixth SuperPipe gold at the X Games, her second straight world championship, the U.S. Grand Prix in Aspen and a win on the Dew Tour, and in January she defended her Laax title.
And in addition to stalwart support from her family (mom Boran told TIME she'd like for her daughter to finish college, but "she can make decisions on her own, so I support her decisions"), skateboarder Evan Berle has joined Team Chloe, the couple now sharing a house together in Los Angeles.
Though for the second straight Olympic Games, loved ones (who aren't coaches and official team members) have to watch from home, Berle was with Kim in Switzerland last month, accompanying her to practice in the falling snow, weather that most athletes who have nothing left to prove would probably avoid.
"Pretty much anybody that I've ever worked with would have gone in on that day," U.S. halfpipe team coach Rick Bower told USA Today. "But Chloe wanted to ride."
In the midst of her latest streak of victories, Kim told Shape that, to get into that championship mode, "I definitely think I switch mentally. I completely tune out, and I become a different person. I'm Chloe Kim, the snowboarder. But when I'm home, I'm Chloe Kim, the Cali girl. There's a different Chloe when I'm on snow, and I love her. She's the best."
Happily, it sounds as though nowadays she has great affection for the other Chloe, too.
"I really do love snowboarding and I love being part of the progression of the sport," Kim told reporters when she got to the Olympic Village in Beijing. She couldn't wait to start practicing at the venue and, she assured, "I'm not burnt out. I was [for] a couple of years after [Pyeongchang], which is why I went to school. I was grateful that I did that, and now I'm excited to be here."
"There is added pressure because it's an Olympics," she added, sharing that she's been working on "amplitude as well as variety" and trying to "incorporate all four directions of spins." But "I've been approaching it as just another contest. That's the mental approach I'm taking."
And yes, life got "very challenging" after she won gold in 2018, and it was "the only thing I could blame," she recalled when asked why she initially threw her medal away. "But don't worry, I got it out of the trash. It's not in there anymore."