Asian American Olympic Gold Medalist Chloe Kim takes year off from snowboarding

The 19-year-old athlete will spend the snowboard season focusing on freshman classes at Princeton University but will return to the snow for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.

“It was a really tough decision,” Kim said in a YouTube video. “I do not hate competing whatsoever. I love it so much, but at the same time, I wanted to kind of explore life outside of that scene for a year. … Competing is really, really stressful.

“I need some Chloe time. I need to be a human. I need to be a normal kid for once because I haven’t been able to do that my whole life.”

The Korean American announced that she was accepted into Princeton a month after the Olympics but deferred her enrolment until this year.

“I want to be in good health for the next Olympics as well as for the rest of my life, so I think this was a good decision,” said Kim. “A lot of people, after the Olympics, they do take a year off from competing, and I didn’t do that last year.”

“When you kind of get stuck in the same routine, over and over and over again, year after year after year, it gets pretty hard,” she said. “I felt like I lost a part of myself in a sense where I didn’t feel like I had an actual life outside of snowboarding. Which is completely fine, because I love snowboarding so much and it is my life, but it made me a little nervous thinking that my life was 100 percent snowboarding, and, after the Olympics last year, I took my ACTs, SATs, studied and I did pretty well and I got into my dream school.”

At the 2018 Winter Olympics, Kim became the youngest woman to win an Olympic snowboarding medal at only 17-years-old. She went on to win an ESPY award for the Best Female Athlete of 2018.

In May discussed dealing with Asian American representation and fame.