Snowboarding sensation and Olympic gold medalist Chloe Kim made a surprising announcement on her YouTube channel in 2019: “I have decided to take this season off competing. And I will be going to school at Princeton University. And it was a really tough decision for me to make because I love snowboarding and I love competing. But I’ve been… competing at a pro level since I was twelve. And I’m nineteen now. So that’s a big chunk of my life… And I want to explore life outside of that scene…”
Following her Olympics win, Mattel had begun selling Chloe Kim dolls in 2018. And a special edition of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, with Kim wearing her gold medal, became the fastest selling cereal box in company history.
However, despite Kim’s bubbly external persona she was struggling inside. According to a Time magazine article by Sean Gregory, Kim threw her gold medal in the trash (later retrieving it). He wrote: “Kim was still a teenager, struggling with the constraints of sudden celebrity and the post-Olympic depression common to elite athletes who spend their lives training for a moment that comes only once every four years.”
When Kim resumed competing after the Olympics, she had lost some of her legendary drive. Then she broke her ankle at the U.S. Open in 2019. “I was so burnt out, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I was in a pretty low, dark place,” she said. At Princeton, says Gregory: “College let Kim be around other talented, driven people who didn’t always succeed. After years of chasing perfection, it was a revelation.” In 2020 the campus was shut down due to the pandemic, and Kim opted to return to competitive snowboarding.
Sometimes we need to go back to the bedrock of our missions, spend time recovering and rediscovering ourselves–like Kim did at Princeton–before we can make more progress. “I would tell my younger self that even though things get hard… you have so much good happening in your life, that the bad isn’t going to hurt you… It’s like an annoying mosquito in the background, just flying around,” she reflected. Kim went on to win another Olympic gold medal in 2022. She has said, “Stay focused on your goals and remember why you started in the first place.”
