THE REAL CHLOE KIM IS READY FOR HER MOMENT
After Chloe Kim returned home from the 2018 Olympics in South Korea, she put her gold medal in what felt at the time like the right place: a trash bin at her parents’ house.
“I hated life,” Kim, now 21, recalls over plates of pad thai in the airy four-bedroom home in the west side of Los Angeles she shares with her boyfriend, skateboarder Evan Berle. It’s early December, and a 10-ft. Christmas tree with an ornament featuring the paw print of her beloved mini Australian shepherd, Reese, looms over the living room. Upstairs, a mishmash of snowboarding awards are piled into a box, since Kim and Berle haven’t built enough shelving to display all the hardware. But it wouldn’t be surprising if many of them stay there. Kim has a conflicted relationship with the plaudits she has racked up on her path from child halfpipe prodigy to the world’s top female snowboarder. And none weighed heavier on her than the gold medal from the Olympics in PyeongChang.
It didn’t stay in the garbage for long. But fame came fast and hard for Kim, whose gravity-defying twists and flips made her the youngest female Olympic gold medalist in snowboarding history. She was an unguarded 17-year-old, quick with a smile and a joke (her tweets about eating churros and feeling “hangry” during the competition were the stuff of a viral marketer’s dream). Suddenly, she was making the rounds of late-night shows, got a Barbie doll designed in her likeness and was shouted out by Frances McDormand at the Oscars. In South Korea, where Kim’s parents were born and her extended family still
