Perfect face of the games
U.S. star Kim brings verve, style to parents’ homeland in search of gold medal
PYEONGCHANG, South Korea — Chloe Kim was 8 when she started noticing that, hmm, Dad seems to be home more.
Jong Jin Kim had come to Los Angeles from South Korea in 1982. He got married and had kids, got divorced and then moved to Switzerland.
That’s where he met Boran, also Korean. In the inimitable words of their future daughter, Chloe:
“My dad was, like, ‘Wait, you’re actually really cool, like, I’m going to wife you up.’ ”
They moved back to Southern California and started a family. Jong Jin owned a car wash, dabbled in real estate and worked for an engineering firm. And then one day, he up and quit. Chloe was 8. Dad seemed to be home more.
But he knew she would become the world’s best halfpipe snowboarder, poised to become the face of the 2018 Olympics — a 17-year-old Korean-American prodigy at a Winter Games in South Korea. Dad’s new job was piloting that destiny.
“It was a really bold move, and I can’t believe my mom was OK with it,” Kim says. “I feel like in another family that would have caused quite a storm. My dad is a very dedicated, determined person. Once he sees something he wants, he has to get it.
“It was nice that he was that determined to bring me to the Olympics. I’m not saying he forced me to snowboard. Like, I genuinely love snowboarding.
“But I didn’t think I’d go to the Olympics. I was like, ‘ Dad thinks I can go to the Olympics. Whatever.’ ”
He first took her to a ski resort in the San Gabriel Mountains when she was 4, less because he had any five-ring aspirations than he wanted Boran to try snowboarding and she refused. To hear Chloe tell it, “he took me as bait” because he knew Boran wouldn’t let her baby girl face the vicissitudes of the mountain without her.
At 5, a coach was handing Jong Jin his business card. At 6, Chloe finished third in her first competition. At 7, she won a junior title. At 8, Chloe and Jong Jin were living with his sister in Switzerland, waking up at 4 a.m. and taking a train to the mountains to practice.
In many respects, Kim is the female Shaun White — plucked by his family from American Chloe Kim is as loquacious as she is talented, which Olympic snowboard fans will see in the women’s halfpipe Monday night. elementary school, traveling from competition to competition, living out of the family van, the next great thing before he was a teenager, beating people twice his age, signing endorsement deals, pushing snowboarding’s envelope, transcending action sports into the marketing mainstream.
Kim’s career has followed a similar arc, with similar expectations, with a similar Olympic launching pad, with similar rewards.
Kim became the youngest X Games medalist at 13, when she finished second behind Olympic halfpipe champion Kelly Clark. She’s the first woman to land back-to-back 1080s (three revolutions).
Clark, the sport’s matriarch, could see it coming, from the time when a tiny girl tugged at her sleeve and asked if she could ride the chairlift with her and then zoomed down the hill. It wasn’t long before Clark was calling representatives at Burton Snow- boards and recommending they sign this kid. Other endorsements followed, and South Korea reportedly made a lucrative offer for her to compete for her parents’ homeland.
“I’m really excited to see where she pushes herself to, where she takes the sport to,” Clark said.
It started Monday with the qualifying rounds, and NBC conveniently moved the final to Tuesday morning in Pyeongchang so it would air live in prime time in the U.S. America, meet Chloe. She is the first mega Olympic star born in the 2000s, a child of social media, bubbly, effervescent, unfiltered. She’s, like, candid.
On her grandmother who lives in Korea: “She’s like the cutest little old lady I’ve ever seen in mylife. She’s also really sassy. Like, if she doesn’t want to do something, she’ll let you know straight up. And you’re, ‘Whoa, Grandma, where did that come from? Simmer down.’ She’ll have her cane and, like, whack you.”
On her culinary preferences: “I really like the (Korean) bulgogi beef and rice cakes. (But) it’s like I always want American food. It’s like, I need In-N-Out. Need to go to Chipotle. Like, KFC, where you at?”
On her cultural identity: “I don’t really feel a click with the Korean culture, but obviously I have a Korean face and I feel like I can’t walk around telling people I’m straight-up American.”
Both parents travel with her now. Boran quit her job to spend the last year on the road, knowing that the little girl is growing up, that everything could be different after this month, that there is talk of college and moving out on her own.
And knowing that the prodigy they spawned will drop into a halfpipe in their homeland, race up its wall and launch into a twisting, spinning, soaring destiny.