A Teen Sensation Grows Up

Everyone seemed to love Chloe Kim when she was a snowboarding prodigy on her way to an Olympic gold medal. When she saw the downside of fame, she stepped back and built a life beyond the halfpipe.

LOS ANGELES — The American snowboarder Chloe Kim was 17 years old at the last Winter Olympics, in Pyeongchang, where she gleefully stomped her way to a gold medal in the halfpipe.

Her near-perfect runs came after a viral tweet about breakfast (“I’m getting hangry,” she wrote moments before her performance) and ended in the embrace of her parents, immigrants from South Korea. Hers may have been the biggest moment of the Olympics for two countries.

Soon, though, she thought of retiring.