When Chloe Kim returned to halfpipe training last October, 19 months since her last snowboard contest, she wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Maybe she wouldn’t have predicted what happened on her first foray in Saas-Fee in the Swiss Alps.
“I actually caught my edge riding down to the mountain,” a beginner’s mistake, she joked last week, “which kind of was embarrassing.”
What happened next was astonishing.
In a three-day span, Kim, who in PyeongChang became the youngest Olympic halfpipe champ at age 17, then took the 2019-20 season off while attending Princeton, said she regained all of the tricks that propelled her to teen stardom.