The Denver Post

Kim takes season off for studies

- By Eddie Pells and Pat Graham

Do not despair, snowboardi­ng fans: Chloe Kim is not retiring.

She is taking a season off from competitio­n and training though — she has already started school at Princeton — in a move that she said was difficult but, ultimately, the thing she needed to do.

“This isn’t like, an ‘ Ohmygosh, I’m retiring video,” the champion snowboarde­r said on a YouTube video provided to The Associated Press in advance of its wider release.

She’ll be back in training next May, with plans to defend her Olympic halfpipe gold medal at the 2022 Games in Beijing.

“But I’m sure a lot of you guys can relate when you get stuck in the same routine over and over and over again, year after year after year, and it gets pretty hard,” Kim said. “And I felt like I lost a part of myself, in a sense, where I didn’t feel like I had an actual life outside of snowboardi­ng.”

It’s not to say she dislikes snowboardi­ng. It’s her life, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.

But at 19, and with a multitude of Winter X- Games titles, world championsh­ips and the Olympic gold medal already on her resume, this felt like the perfect time to take a break, let her body heal and “dip my toes into that chapter of my life.”

“I need some Chloe time, I need to be a human, need to be a normal kid for once,” she explained in the video. “Because I haven’t done that at any point in my life.”

The arc of Kim’s snowboardi­ng career has been told and retold, especially in the build- up to her Olympic victory in her parents’ homeland of South Korea. By the time she was 7, she was winning contests. At age 8, she was living in Switzerlan­d to begin training to eventually become the most dominant female snowboarde­r in the history of the sport. Until this fall at Princeton, homeschool­ing had kept her out of the classroom since seventh grade, “which is terrifying,” she said on the video.

In a different video posted last month, she spoke of the difficulti­es of starting college, of hearing the whispers and seeing the phones come out when she steps into the dining hall _ of being a celebrity when she really just wants to be a college kid.

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