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, with $800. He got a job as a dishwasher at a fast-food franchise, then another as a cashier at a liquor store. He saved money, went to college, got an engineering degree. He got married and had kids, got divorced and moved to Switzerland to work for a tour company that brought Koreans to Europe.

That’s where he met Boran, also Korean, also working in the European tourism industry. 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, worked for an engineering firm. And then one day, up and quit. Chloe was 8. Dad seemed to be home more.


He knew it. She didn’t. 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 Korea. His 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 Mountain High 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, she 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 elementary school in Carlsbad, traveling from competition to competition, living out of the family van, the next great thing before he was a teen-ager, 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). She would have been among the favorites in Sochi four years ago, but the minimum age to compete at an Olympics is 15 and she wouldn’t turn 14 for another couple months. Instead she went to the 2016 Youth Olympic Games in Norway, where she was the U.S. flagbearer at Opening Ceremony and won in both halfpipe and slopestyle.

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 chair lift with her and then zoomed down the hill. It wasn’t long before Clark was calling representatives at Burton Snowboards and recommending they sign this kid. Now.


Toyota inked her a few days after her 16th birthday.

Target sponsors her.

South Korea reportedly made a lucrative offer for her to compete for her parents’ homeland.

Says Clark: “I’m really excited to see where she pushes herself to, where she takes the sport to.”


It starts Sunday night (San Diego time) with the qualifying rounds, Monday night with the final – conveniently moved to the morning in Pyeongchang by NBC so they air live in prime time on the East Coast. America, meet Chloe.

She is the first mega Olympic star born in the 2000s, a child of social media, of Snapchat and Instagram and Twitter – 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 my life. She’s also really sassy, which explains why my mom is really sassy, too. Like, if she doesn’t want to do something she’ll let you know straight up that she doesn’t want to do it. 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. It’s pretty good, but when I travel with my parents my mom’s always cooking Korean food, so 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 sister’s make-up: “In Korea, it’s pretty to be really pale, like white pale. And so my oldest sister is actually more Korean than I am, I guess. She’s always putting really white make-up on her face, and I’m like, ‘If you’re going to do that at least like blend it down to your neck so you don’t have like five different colors on your body.’ I’m always yelling at my sister because she’s just embarrassing herself.”

On her cultural identity: “That’s a tough one. I’m so used to America. 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. I’m Korean-American. I always get the question: ‘Where are you from? L.A. No, where are you really from? I was born in Long Beach. No, no, no, where are you really, really, really from? My parents are from Korea. Oh, OK.’”

They both travel with her now. Boran quit her job to spent this past year on the road, too, knowing that the little girl on a snowboard at Mountain High is growing up, that everything could be different after this month, that there is talk of college and moving out of her own.

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.


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mark.zeigler@sduniontribune.com; Twitter: @sdutzeigler