Snowboarder Chloe Kim is ready for her moment.
Kim, 17, has talent to strike gold in snowboarding
After every practice run down the pipe, JongJin Kim races alongside his daughter, offering advice and helping her scoot through the flats.
It’s been that way ever since Chloe Kim started snowboarding. And thanks to more than a few gentle nudges from Dad, the 17year-old Kim is poised to join the likes of Shaun White and Kelly Clark as Olympic champion snowboarders who have driven their sport to new heights.
It started when she was little, Jong-Jin said, with persistent urgings to ride switch. (For anyone who’s never ridden a board, switch is leading with the nondominant leg, a task not unlike writing with your nondominant hand.)
“I emphasized switch all her life,” Jong-Jin said Friday as the Olympic snowboarders got their first day of practice in the PyeongChang pipe at Phoenix Park resort.
When she was riding flats, JongJin told her to ride switch. When she was heading down to the chairlift after riding in the pipe, ride switch. From the top of the chair, down to the pipe: switch.
Today, the Team USA star is one of the best switch riders in snowboarding. It’s almost like she doesn’t have a weakness. There is no dominant or less dominant direction. Her frontside 1080 looks just as strong as her switch 1080. It’s a talent that has fueled her ascendancy to becoming snowboarding’s undisputed female champion.
“I tell her all the time, if you go down to the chair in your regular
stance, what is your benefit? Nothing. If you ride switch, you at least get advantage,” said Jong-Jin who quit his engineering job almost a decade ago to help support his daughter’s snowboarding dream.
There’s a saying in his home country of South Korea, he said.
“Little dust can make a big mountain. That’s true, right? Little by little,” he said. “Try to get benefit every single moment of riding. That way you get better, little bit by little bit, and you don’t waste any practice time.”
Kim said she tries to turn the pressure to perform into an affirmation. As a leading contender for Olympic gold, that’s a good way to spin the expectations.
“When it does creep into the back of my mind, I try to see it in a positive way,” she said. “You know what these people who are expecting all of this out of me, they do that because they know what I can do and they believe in me. So I just think about it like that and it makes me better.”
Jong-Jin said when his California-born daughter turned 13 or 14, she stopped listening to him.
“Whatever I say, she ‘roar, roar, roar, go away, I don’t need you,’ ” he said, laughing.
Jong-Jin laughs a lot. And he’s undeterred by his daughter’s teenage ways. She doesn’t turn him away either. Each pass down the pipe, she’s waving at her mom and dad.
“I emphasize a lot of switch all the time, but it’s not as easy now. It’s pretty difficult now,” he said, laughing even more. “I say, ‘Oh, Chloe, can you …’ and she says, ‘Dad, Dad, stop. You are annoying me.’ ”
And there he is the next lap, jogging as she rolls through the flats, offering a tip, helping her along. And they’re both smiling.