Teenage prodigy Kim tweets on route to gold
American snowboarder thrashes halfpipe rivals Hawaiian pizza on menu after event’s best-ever run
With tears of joy and a wonderfully giddy expression that suggested she could not quite believe what was happening, Chloe Kim looked as flummoxed as any 17-year-old would if they were plonked on the top of an Olympic podium.
In some ways Kim is just like any other young woman her age – she tweets about her love of junk food, she listens to Lady Gaga and she loves to dance.
Only Kim could not be further from a normal teenager because she does all of that at the same time as winning Olympic gold. Literally.
In yesterday’s final of the women’s halfpipe, she tweeted, then stuffed her phone in her pocket, did a little dance at the top of the run, put her earphones in and produced the greatest run in the Olympic history of the event.
Just 5ft 3in and not yet out of high school, Kim is, to many people, including her immigrant father Jong Jin, the embodiment of the American dream. She is also the future, not to mention the distinctly modern present, of snowboarding.
Some are already calling her the greatest female boarder ever. It would not be a stretch to suggest she might be the future of winter sport. If that all sounds hyperbolic, then think again. Kim’s time has been coming.
Sponsored by the snowboarding brand Burton since the age of 11, she was good enough to compete at the Sochi Olympics four years ago when she qualified for the American team but was denied her spot because regulations prohibited a 13-year-old from competing. She won her first X Games title aged 14 and a year later became the first woman to land back-to-back 1080 spins – a double move requiring such power and skill that none of her rivals can match it, and one which she performed in her final run yesterday to score a phenomenal 98.25 points when the gold medal was already hers.
By comparison, China’s Jiayu Liu took second with a score of 89.75. Over the course of the two days of competition, Kim posted the four highest scores. She is in a league of her own and the numbers tell only half the story. The dynamism, the agility and the ease with which she seemed to achieve it left everyone in attendance in awe. Even her rivals talk longingly of wanting to feel what Kim feels when she flies through the air. That her moment of glory should come in Pyeongchang of all places made her victory even more remarkable. It was in 1982 that Kim’s father emigrated from South Korea to California in the search for a better life, working a series of minimum wage jobs to get by. Born and raised in the United States, but fluent in Korean, Kim was introduced to the sport when her father used her “as a decoy to get her mother to learn to snowboard”.
The plan failed, but it sowed the seeds for what happened yesterday when 20 family members gathered and Kim put the finishing touches to a masterpiece that had been 36 years in the making.
“My dad has sacrificed a lot for me,” she said afterwards. “I don’t know if I could quit work and travel with your kid full-time, leaving your wife behind and chasing after this dream because your kid is really passionate. I did it for my family and everything they’ve done for me. It means a lot being able to do it where my family is from.
“This is the best outcome I could ever ask. It’s been such a long journey and going home with the gold is amazing.”
She then said she wanted Hawaiian pizza and pretended to sing into the microphone while waiting for her answer to be translated for local media.
So yes, she is a typical teenager. But she is a teenager with a fearless attitude, a phenomenal talent, a magnetic personality and a desire so strong that she forced herself to produce that 98.25-point run even though gold was already guaranteed, “just for me to show myself I could do it”. There is not a lot normal about that.