Lindsey Vonn

made a shock comeback to ski racing in December at age 40 and she has the Olympics in her sights. Vonn, who has a new , is for the second — and final — time after next year’s Olympics, when women’s races will be held on one of her favorite courses in Cortina. Vonn specializes in the super-G and downhill and is the all-time leader in World Cup downhill victories with 43. The American has a total of 82 World Cup wins and clinched Olympic gold in the downhill in 2010 as well as bronze in both the super-G in 2010 and downhill in 2018. Vonn proved she can still be competitive when she finished and in a downhill and a super-G in St. Anton, Austria, last month.

Mikaela Shiffrin

might be the winningest racer in World Cup history with 99 victories but the American standout will be targeting Olympic redemption at next year’s Games. Shiffrin won gold in the slalom in 2014 and also in the giant slalom four years later but in 2022, skiing out on the first run of both her signature events. Shiffrin recently returned to the circuit after two months out with injury and the 29-year-old World Cup slalom in Courchevel, France.

Ilia Malinin

The “Quad God” is coming to the Olympics. Ilia Malinin’s performances are built around high-risk, high-reward quadruple jumps. He on his way to a third U.S. figure skating title in January, including the quad axel, which involves four-and-a-half turns in the air. Only Malinin has ever landed it in competition. The Olympic Games are a family tradition for the 20-year-old from Virginia, whose parents were both Olympians for Uzbekistan. Malinin will aim to carry on the legacy of Nathan Chen, whose “Rocket Man” skate won gold for the U.S. in 2022.

Eileen Gu

Multinational freeskiing sensation burst onto the world stage at the Beijing Winter Olympics, aged just 18, as she became the first action-sports athlete to take three medals in one Games. Gu won two golds ( , ) and (slopestyle) in China. Born in California, Gu decided to ski for China to inspire girls in her mother’s homeland and show them what is possible on the snow. Gu has also won three golds and a bronze at the X Games as well as two world championship golds and a bronze. She is practically unbeatable on the halfpipe, emerging victorious on 14 of her 17 World Cup starts. The 21-year-old is also a model and a student at Stanford.

Chloe Kim

Chloe Kim is a pioneer of women’s snowboarding and has had an air of invincibility on the halfpipe ever since she burst onto the international scene , becoming the youngest woman to win an Olympic snowboarding gold medal — aged just 17. as she joined three-time Olympic champion Shaun White as the only snowboarder to win back-to-back titles on the halfpipe. The 24-year-old American is also an eight-time X Games gold medalist.

Nicolò Ernesto Canclini

An Olympic medal is the dream for any athlete. An Olympic medal on home snow in the sport����ap debut in the Games, even more so. That is what Italian Nicolò Ernesto Canclini is aiming for when ski mountaineering — or “Skimo” — makes its debut at the Milan-Cortina Games. Moreover, Canclini lives just 300 meters from the Olympic slope in Bormio. The 28-year-old Canclini is a world-class athlete, one of the top in his sport, but nowhere near to a household name in Italy. That could all change next year.

Lucas Pinheiro Braathen

Brazil has a rare realistic shot at what would be its first-ever medal at the Winter Olympics. became the first Brazilian skier to finish on a World Cup podium when he placed in Beaver Creek, Colorado, in December. He was last month. The 24-year-old Pinheiro Braathen’s mother is Brazilian and his father is Norwegian. He had raced for Norway until abruptly retiring in 2023, shortly after winning the slalom world cup title, after getting into a dispute with the Norwegian ski federation following modeling work for a rival brand of the federation’s clothing supplier. Pinheiro Braathen has five career World Cup race wins, three in slalom and two in giant slalom. He competed for Norway at the 2022 Beijing Olympics but did not complete either race.

Therese Johaug

It doesn’t matter how many times the 36-year-old Norwegian cross-country skiing star says she will not compete at the Winter Games next year; everyone seems to be waiting for her to change her mind. Like Vonn, last year — and it is clear she is in top form even after two years away from the sport. Last month she claimed her at the Val di Fiemme venue that will host cross country skiing at next year’s Olympics. Johaug, who has four Olympic gold medals from Vancouver 2010 and Beijing 2022, plus one silver and one bronze from Sochi 2014, has insisted she will quit for good after this season. Nevertheless, Norway hopes she will postpone her retirement by just one more year.

The world’s most elite and international sporting event, which pits athletes and countries against each other, underscores along the way the crude reality that many Asian women face: of only being seen when they have something to offer.

“It����ap like Asian American women can’t win,” says Jeff Yang, an author and cultural critic. “Asian American female athletes, like most Asian American women in many other spaces, are seen as worthy when they can deliver … and then disposed of otherwise.”

The issue is playing out at the Beijing Winter Games, the third straight Olympics set in Asia and the second held during the unrelenting global coronavirus crisis — and playing out, too, during a rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans.

Here, U.S. snowboarder Chloe Kim and China’s freestyle skier Eileen Gu are the latest additions to the list of American women of Asian descent who have been “It Girls” of the Winter Games, joining icons like American figure skaters Kristi Yamaguchi and Michelle Kwan.

When Kim and Gu earned their gold medals in Beijing, it was the perfect bow on professional narratives that have been covered incessantly leading up to the actual event. Their star power and talent made them two of the de facto spokeswomen for the Olympics.

Meanwhile, other Asian American women like figure skaters Karen Chen and Alysa Liu of the U.S. team and Zhu Yi of the China team have also been promoted by their national teams and scrutinized — sometimes harshly — by Olympic fans.

Commentators have mocked Yi for falling in the team event, as if she deserved the mistake after giving up her U.S. citizenship to compete for her ancestral homeland. Others are angry that she “stole” the Olympic spot from an actual China-born athlete.

Even the winners struggle to feel fully embraced in America.

Kim, who won the halfpipe at the Beijing and Pyeongchang Olympics, has revealed she was tormented online daily. She says she was consumed by fear that her parents could be killed whenever she heard news about another brutal assault on an Asian person.

There have been more than 10,000 reported anti-Asian incidents — from taunts to outright assaults – between March 2020 and September 2021, according to Stop AAPI Hate, a national coalition that gathers data on racially motivated attacks related to the pandemic.

“The experience of hate is withering, and it takes a huge mental health toll,” says Cynthia Choi, the coalition’s co-founder. “When we think about the Olympics, it����ap really incredibly powerful to have taken place in Asia three times in a row. That context is very significant, and to have Asian Americans and Asians representing the United States in these games is more than symbolic.”

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders across the country have endured racist verbal, physical and sometimes deadly attacks for two years now, fueled by the pandemic.

Some perpetrators have based their hate on the fact that the virus was first detected in Wuhan, China. Adding to the mix: former President Donald Trump, who regularly talked about COVID-19 in racial terms.

Gu, the daredevil freestyle skier who placed first in the big air competition, said she’d never been as scared as when a man directed a tirade about the coronavirus’ Chinese origins against her and her immigrant grandmother at a San Francisco pharmacy.

The San Francisco native, fashion model and social media figure has also been criticized with anti-China rhetoric for switching from the U.S. team to the China team. Conservative Fox News personalities Tucker Carlson and Will Cain even dedicated a segment to berating Gu, saying she was “ungrateful” and is “betraying her country.”

Those racially charged denunciations have been called out on social media for being hypocritical. Phil Yu, who runs the popular Angry Asian Man blog, tweeted succinctly: “Oh sure, it����ap always ‘go back to your country’ but not ‘go back to your country and win a gold medal.’”

The dichotomy of the Asian American woman’s existence is not limited to Winter Olympians, though. In October, Hmong American gymnast Sunisa Lee said she was pepper sprayed by someone shouting racist slurs while driving by in a car. At the time, she was standing outside with a group of Asian American friends in Los Angeles while filming the “Dancing with the Stars” TV show.

Lesser-profile Olympians from the Tokyo Games like golfer Danielle Kang and karateka Sakura Kokumai spoke about their experiences with anti-Asian hate last summer.

Kang said she’s fought racism all her life and urged for a broader social studies curriculum that could better capture today’s multicultural America.

“I’ve been told to go back to China. I don’t know why they think China is the only Asian country,” said the Korean American athlete. “I also have heard, ‘Do you eat dogs for dinner?’ It����ap nothing new to me. However, the violence was very upsetting. But the violence also has been around. I’ve gotten into fist fights. I’ve grown up like this.”

Kokumai, who is Japanese American, was angry to discover that the same man who had harassed her in April with racist slurs also assaulted an elderly Asian American couple.

Equally painful: colleagues’ silence when the incident was reported. She said Japan’s coach called her about it before members of her U.S. team did.

“It was really hurtful that it took so long for my side of the federation to address it,” Kokumai said last summer.

In July, when Lee became the surprise breakout star of the Tokyo Olympics by winning gold in the all-around event and bronze on uneven bars, Sung Yeon Choimorrow, executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, said she felt conflicted about seeing Lee on a pedestal given the way Hmongs have been marginalized.

“I’m really wrestling with this idea that we’re all ‘American’ only when it comes to us being excellent and winning medals for the country,” Choimorrow said. “Asian American women are hyper-visible in ways that dehumanize us and completely invisible in the ways that humanize us.”

When his skates touched down for the final time in a historic arena in Beijing, he was an Olympic gold medalist.

Up at Genting Snow Park, Chloe Kim nailed all five jumps on her first run through the Secret Garden Olympic halfpipe, enough for her to easily defend her Olympic title on Thursday.

It was the United States’ best day yet at the Beijing Games. The United States also won gold in the Olympics’ first mixed team aerials event, giving it a total of four gold medals and 10 overall.

Chen, whose parents immigrated from China, had a memorable free skate to finally put behind him the immense disappointment from four years ago, when a nightmarish short program in South Korea dashed his medal hopes.

Skating his “Rocketman” program set to the film score by Elton John, the 22-year-old Chen landed all five of his quads to leave no question he was the best in the world. He finished with 332.60 points, three off his own world record and 22 ahead of silver medalist Yuma Kagiyama of Japan. Shoma Uno of Japan took bronze.

“It means the world. I’m just so happy,” said Chen, who was relaxed and expressive throughout his routine.

Chen, who is from Salt Lake City, took off with an opening quad salchow. He effortlessly landed four more quads. He had a slight bobble on a late combination sequence.

When his scores were read, coach Rafael Arutyunyan raised Chen’s left arm like a championship boxer.

In the Capital Indoor Stadium, where the United States and China played the first matches of the pingpong diplomacy in 1971, Chen made some history of his own by capping one of the most dominant four-year runs in skating history. Since his disappointment in Pyeongchang, Chen has won three straight world championships — the 2020 competition was canceled because of the pandemic — and extended his run of national championships to six.

Chen is the first American figure skating champion since Evan Lysacek in 2010.

KIM’S CORONATION

Chloe Kim was so good on her first run down the halfpipe that it didn’t matter that she failed to land a big trick on her last run, aka the victory lap. The 21-year-old, who started snowboarding as a kid in Southern California, became the first woman to win consecutive Olympic titles on the halfpipe.

The last rider into the halfpipe on the first run, Kim landed all five jumps, including a front and backside 1080 — three spins each — and a 900. She seemed to amaze even herself, twice putting her hands to her head at the end of the run, which earned a score of 94.

Kim had struggled in practice before the competition began.

“I was just so proud of myself. I had the worst practice ever,” she said. “I probably landed my run twice when I’m used to landing it eight times. That kind of puts you in a weird headspace.”

IOC President Thomas Bach and China’s superstar freestyle skier Eileen Gu were in the crowd. Gu even hugged Kim between runs.

Queralt Castellet of Spain took the silver medal in her fifth Olympics. Sena Tomita of Japan held off Cai Xuetong of China for bronze.

Shaun White will try for his second straight halfpipe gold medal and fourth overall on Friday in his fifth and final Olympics. Kim joined White as the only snowboarders to win back-to-back halfpipe golds. White did it in 2006 and 2010. After finishing fourth in Sochi, the 35-year-old from Carlsbad, California, returned to the top of the podium in 2018.

SHIFFRIN RESETS

The U.S. ski team said two-time Olympic gold medalist Mikaela Shiffrin will compete in the super-G on Friday. Shiffrin failed to finish both the giant slalom and slalom, missing a gate within seconds of starting each race.

She had two training runs on the super-G course Thursday. The 26-year-old from Colorado never has entered a super-G at an Olympics but did win it at the 2019 world championships.

“I will try to reset again, and maybe try to reset better this time,” Shiffrin said after the slalom. “But I also don’t know how to do better because,” she continued, before pausing, “because I just don’t.”

Shiffrin is trying to become the first Alpine ski racer from the United States to win three Olympic golds across a career.

MIXED TEAM AERIALS

The American trio of Ashley Caldwell, Christopher Lillis and Justin Schoenefeld each earned their first Winter Games medals in mixed team aerials, the first time the United States medaled in the freestyle skiing discipline in a dozen years. Lillis’ back double full-full-double full was given the highest score of any trick in the finals, and the U.S. title was assured when Schoenefeld followed with a clean back double full-full-full.

FOLLOWING HIS FATHER

Austrian skier Johannes Strolz won the Olympic gold medal in the Alpine combined race 34 years after his father, Hubert, did the same.

The 29-year-old Strolz was fourth fastest after the downhill run, but he was half a second quicker than anyone else in the slalom. He edged first-run leader Aleksander Aamodt Kilde of Norway by 0.58 seconds. Jack Crawford of Canada took bronze.

The combined adds the times from one downhill run and one slalom run.

Hubert Strolz won gold in combined at the 1988 Calgary Olympics and the silver in the giant slalom.

“It����ap really a great moment for me and I’m so thankful that I finally can live my dream and have this gold medal in my hands like my father did in 1988 in Calgary and, yeah, just a dream come true,” Strolz said. “The gold medal really means the world to me.”

DOPING REPORT

Russian figure skating superstar Kamila Valieva practiced as usual, hours after reports surfaced that she had tested positive for a banned substance.

The 15-year-old Valieva, who was expected to deliver her nation its third straight Olympic gold medal in women’s figure skating, tested positive for a banned heart medication before the Beijing Games, the Russian newspaper RBC reported.

Valieva scored maximum points in the women’s individual sections of the team event, which the Russians skaters won.

The International Skating Union declined to address the reports, saying it “cannot disclose any information about any possible anti-doping rule violation.”

The last rider to drop into the halfpipe, and with the contest already over, the 21-year-old American still attempted to go big one last time. She fell, quickly got back up and casually glided the rest of the way down the halfpipe as the Olympic champion. She greeted her fellow medalists at the bottom with an embrace.

On this day, the only real drama was for second place, with 32-year-old Queralt Castellet of Spain taking silver in her fifth Olympic appearance. Sena Tomita of Japan held off Cai Xuetong of China for bronze.

No one was matching Kim’s height or demanding array of tricks. Not after an opening performance that featured a variety of different spins and rotations, including a front and backside 1080 (three spins each). That flawless run appeared to surprise even her as she covered her mouth in excitement. She later told her coach it was the best one she’s done.

Kim joins fellow American Shaun White as the only snowboarders to defend their Olympic titles in the halfpipe. White accomplished the feat in 2006 and ’10. As the defending champion from the Pyeongchang Games, White can do it again on Friday.

Watching the contest Thursday was IOC President Thomas Bach and Chinese freestyle skier Eileen Gu, who recently won the Olympic big air competition. They were treated to quite a performance from Kim, who won at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games as a 17-year old. Gu gave Kim a hug after one of her three runs.

The showdown between those two Alpine skiing stars highlights Day 4 of the Beijing Games, which also includes qualifying runs for Shaun White and Chloe Kim, the start of snowboardcross coverage and the first curling medals of these Olympics.

Here are some things to watch (all times Eastern):

SLALOM SHOWDOWN

Shiffrin won the slalom at the 2014 Games and is a four-time world champion in the event. Vlhova, however, has a big lead in the World Cup slalom standings this season, after Shiffrin was slowed by contracting the coronavirus.

A bad turn in the giant slalom Monday knocked the American star out of that event on the opening run. Vlhova, of Slovakia, finished 14th.

“Something was missing, and I was a bit in trouble with the conditions,” Vlhova said. “I tried to do my best, but it was not enough.”

NBC plans to show the women’s slalom live as part of its prime-time and late-night coverage Tuesday.

SNOWBOARD STARS

Shiffrin’s rough start was a downer for the U.S., but now it����ap time for a couple other American standouts to begin competing. Shaun White, the three-time gold medalist who said recently the Beijing Games would be his last competition, begins qualifying for the halfpipe. So does Chloe Kim, who, like White is a defending champion in that event.

“I really want to finish my career strongly on my own terms and put down some solid runs,” White said. “If I could do that, I’ll be very happy.”

NBC is carrying women’s qualifying live in prime time and the men live in its late-night slot. USA Network will also have live coverage of women’s halfpipe.

The chaotic, high-flying snowboardcross also begins with the women’s competition. Lindsey Jacobellis, who missed out on gold in 2006 when she fell after grabbing her board in premature celebration, is still chasing an Olympic title.

NBC is carrying snowboardcross qualifying during its late-night coverage, and USA Network plans to air the qualifying and final rounds live. The final isn’t expected to start until well after 2 a.m.

CURLING

The mixed doubles competition wraps up when Italy faces Norway for the gold medal. USA Network is set to air that at 1 p.m. CNBC will show the bronze medal game between Sweden and Britain at 5 p.m. and the gold medal game at 8.

Amos Mosaner and Stefania Constantini have already clinched Italy’s first-ever Olympic curling medal by reaching the final.

“That feels great,” coach Claudio Pescia said. “Not only that we have a medal, but the performance these two athletes made this week is amazing.”

LUGE

Germany’s Natalie Geisenberger is trying for her third consecutive gold medal in singles luge. USA Network will show the final run live in the morning, with an encore presentation by NBC in the afternoon.

Geisenberger can become the first three-time women’s singles gold medalist in Olympic history.

ALSO OF NOTE

Norwegian cross-country skiing star Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo finished 40th in the skiathlon, but he has another medal shot in the sprint. USA Network will have the men’s and women’s sprints live in the morning, with NBC showing them in the afternoon and USA Network showing them again in the 7:30 p.m.-2:55 a.m. time slot … NBC will air the final of men’s freestyle skiing Big Air live in prime time. … American speedskater Joey Mantia competes in the 1,500 meters. USA Network will air that between 9:20 a.m. and 1 p.m., and again later. NBC is showing it in prime time.

Skateboarders have taken over Middle America this week. It����ap a dress rehearsal for this summer, when they’ll bring their show to the rest of the world at the Olympics.

The questions under the magnifying glass at this week’s Dew Tour — one of the last major qualifying events for the Tokyo Games in July — are whether the Olympics is ready for skateboarding and, more tellingly, whether skateboarding is ready for the Olympics.

“That����ap the beautiful thing about skateboarding,” said Mariah Duran, a 24-year-old from Albuquerque, New Mexico, who is one of a handful of U.S. medal hopefuls. “It takes you places you’ve never been.”

More than 20 years after its wintertime cousin, snowboarding, reluctantly took to the biggest stage in sports, skateboarding is grinding its way into the much more crowded summer program. It����ap one of a number of attempts by the International Olympic Committee — surfing, rock climbing and 3-on-3 basketball are also debuting in Tokyo — to appeal to a younger, trendier, more easily distracted audience.

Whether any of this is truly “saving” the Olympics for the next generation is a matter of opinion. Viewership numbers — many proprietary, most skewed by the online fragmentation of the audience and all of them open to manipulation to tell whatever story might fit the narrative — indicate the games still have issues with the in-demand 18-to-34 market. (That puts them in good company: The NFL and MLB and pretty much anything aired on TV are also doing worse in that demographic over the past decade.)

Regardless of whether either side enjoys a boost from this new partnership, suffice it to say that none of it would’ve happened without the 1998 introduction of snowboarding to the Olympics. Despite its now-veteran status in the games, the so-called shredders still get treated like the shiny new thing on the shelf every four years. And while the entire sport has prospered over the two decades, snowboarding has delivered only two athletes the average person might recognize on the street: Shaun White and Chloe Kim.

But lots of folks just beneath that level — Jamie Anderson, Red Gerard, Danny Davis and others — have made very good livings, as well. All of which has been enough to woo a big chunk of skateboarding’s elite into the Olympics without much hand-wringing.

“We’re like surfing or snowboarding, in that the competitors were pretty reluctant to join into something like that,” said one of skateboarding’s forefathers, 50-year-old Mike Vallely, who is helping call the action this week in Iowa. “But once Shaun White started having this great success, the kids coming up started seeing that as what is possible.”

Another conversation that enveloped snowboarding back in the day was whether competing for cash and fame fit into the overall ethos of the “lifestyle” sport that snowboarding wanted to be — a sport that valued fun and filming as much as money and medals. Skateboarders deal with that issue, as well, and some are just as good at threading that needle.

“You look at snowboarding and the way it is now, and I know they love to compete,” said 20-year-old Jagger Eaton, who is trying to qualify in both the park and street events being showcased at the games. “But they’ve also always loved being out on the (backcountry), and going out and filming projects. And they’ve shown they can do both.”

Said Dashawn Jordan, a football player-turned-skateboarder who is also aiming for Tokyo: “I was introduced to skateboarding through the competitive side. And then I found out a lot about what the other side of the sport looks like. I look at all the amazing people who try really hard to keep both factors in play.”

The most successful athlete in the current-day group is American Nyjah Huston, a 12-time X Games and five-time world champion who, in a sign of where the soul of this sport has already moved, includes a shoe deal with Nike among his cache of endorsements.

“I never put much thought into it being in the Olympics,” Huston said. “I was always confused about why it wasn’t in there, but at least it����ap in there now, and I’m hyped for it.”

There’s also, Sky Brown, the 12-year-old competing for her father’s home country of Britain who spent about half her time growing up in Japan, her mother’s native country and the place where all the action is happening this summer. She also surfs and recently took time off to star in, and win, “Dancing With The Stars: Juniors.”

As mass marketable as it might be, skateboarding still has some hurdles to climb. In Japan, skateboarding in broad daylight on a busy street is still frowned upon. It����ap not all that much different in some places in America.

“We didn’t start out as hoodlums or bad guys, but we came up against so much resistance and oppression,” Vallely said. “It spurred two different things. We wanted to promote skating, but also, there was pushback, and we weren’t afraid to say, ‘No, we’re not going take this.”

Josh Friedberg, the CEO of USA Skateboarding, dates some of this attitude back to a Life Magazine cover in 1965 that featured the girls national champion doing a handstand on a board, next to the headline: “The craze and the menace of skateboards.”

“It was immediately cast as something that����ap not good, and that carried on in different iterations through every decade,” Friedberg said.

If the Olympics might be viewed as offering some sort of mainstream seal of approval to a once-rebellious sport, what����ap left to be seen is whether the five rings will keep it fun or suck the life out of it. That, even two decades later, is a debate they’re still having about the superpipe in snowboarding.

However their show plays in Tokyo, skateboarders feel pretty good about their place in the sports world these days.

Des Moines spent more than a decade trying to get America’s largest open skate park built. The 88,000-foot venue opened this week for the Dew Tour. Leaders in the sport think the Olympics make it easier to build more like this in the future.

“I never needed the Olympics to justify skateboarding for me,” Vallely said. “But I sure get a lot of phone calls now. They see it����ap in the Olympics and they know I was involved in all this. I feel like I did some good work.”

Mission(s) accomplished, and now that she’s back at her day job — best female athlete in the superpipe — it looks as though she never left.

Now 20, and with a year at Princeton under her belt, the Olympic champion is in the lineup for the Winter X Games, going for her fifth gold medal on the superpipe in Aspen on Saturday night. Her chance to defend the Olympic title is a scant 13 months away.

If she lost much during her 22 months off the snow, it doesn’t show. Kim’s first contest back — last week in Laax, Switzerland — ended like most of them do: with a gold medal hanging around her neck and the rest of the field contemplating a superpipe-sized gap between them and the champion.

Not that she took any of it for granted.

“I was so anxious because not only have I not done any of that in almost two years, but it was more with COVID and quarantining, and sitting around and freaking out,” Kim told The Associated Press. “I’m thinking, ‘What if this doesn’t go the way I want? What if I don’t know how to do anything anymore?’”

Not likely. But the year in college did give Kim an unflinching look at some things she really couldn’t do — things that never really came up during a childhood during which she blended home-schooling with a busy travel schedule and a life synched around the rhythms of the yearly the snowboard circuit.

“I learned how bad I was at time management,” she said. “All my friends had planners, calendars, they were writing schedules out. I was like, ‘What is that?’ I had always lived life on the go. Very flexible. But if you’re in school, assignments are due at 11:59 p.m.”

Her Olympic victory in Pyeongchang three Winters ago validated the massive hype that surrounded Kim and her story. She was the teenage phenom from California but with Korean roots, poised to take the gold medal on “home turf” of sorts, and with her grandma in the stands, to boot.

All that happened, and Kim’s post-Olympic life was the kind you would expect, filled with walks down the red carpet, hundreds of interviews with everyone from sports to lifestyle writers — “ What����ap the one beauty rule you swear by? Moisturizing.” — ambushes from the paparazzi and, of course, a Chloe Kim-inspired Barbie doll.

All of it great. But after a rough landing at the Burton U.S. Open in March 2019 left her with a broken ankle, Kim came to terms with the reality that her body, and mind, needed a break. She had been snowboarding almost non-stop throughout her childhood.

“I need to be human, need to be a normal kid for once,” she explained in an October 2019 video announcing that she had enrolled at Princeton.

She put the snowboard away, and insisted her main form of exercise to stay in shape were her fast-paced walks across campus. She tried as hard as she could to blend in. She made new friends.

“I think one of the most important things I learned was you can make a really good connection with people who don’t have the exact same interests as you,” Kim said in her interview with AP. “Finding those similarities with people who aren’t snowboarders or athletes, it opened my world a bit more.”

When training resumed in earnest this fall, Kim saw a world vastly changed by the coronavirus pandemic — her trips now punctuated by quarantines and social distancing.

“It����ap weird seeing someone you haven’t seen in a year and sorta giving them a fake air hug,” she said.

In that way, she’s in the same place as everyone else in her sport — trying to adapt to a new normal, in need of real halfpipes and real competition to start the intense run-up to the Beijing Olympics next year.

But in so many other ways, she’s unlike anyone else on the snow.

She remains the only female to land back-to-back 1080-degree jumps in a competition — a combo she landed even though she didn’t need to to punctuate the win on her career-making day in Korea. To her, that����ap just a starting point for the 2021 season and beyond.

“I definitely won’t be telling anyone” what her newest trick is, she said. “You just have to tune in and see it. But the most important thing is, we’re all having fun out here.”

ESPN announced Tuesday that the first major action-sports contest since the COVID-19 pandemic started forcing major cancellations will take place during its usual slot in Aspen, Colorado, from Jan. 29-31, but will be closed off to fans.

Among those expected to compete are Chloe Kim, Mark McMorris and David Wise, all of whom have missed several events since cancellations scrubbed the late-winter calendar earlier in 2020. They now find themselves facing an uncertain international schedule with only 14 months to get ready for the Beijing Olympics.

“Obviously it’s been tough on everybody,” said Tim Reed, the ESPN executive who oversees the X Games. “No doubt the athletes are excited to get back out there.”

The first Winter X Games took place in 1997 in California, and the games have settled in Aspen since 2002. They have long been regarded as the most prestigious set of contests on the action-sports calendar, and their focus has shifted over time.

The event has mushroomed over the decades into a festival-like gathering that draws more than 110,000 fans to Aspen over the weekend. It features live bands, house and street parties.

To have any chance of putting on a show this winter, however, ESPN had to pass through a number of health-related regulatory hurdles to ensure county officials they would be running a safe, socially distanced event.

An event that has traditionally drawn more than 200 athletes will probably include about 90. A support staff that often numbers more than 1,000 will be cut in half. There are no plans to have spectators. Fans are urged to watch the action on ESPN, which owns and produces the event, and online.

“The safety is always the most critical aspect of this,” Reed said. “We really believe our events can be produced in a way that mitigates risks to all.”

As part of the Disney family, the X Games has learned a lot from experts, both in the health and TV production areas, from several different sports, including those who helped make the NBA’s bubble in Florida work.

In many ways, hosting a three-day outdoor event that doesn’t include any contact between the competitors is a less daunting task than, say, 10 weeks of NBA games.

Still, organizers are designing an intensive testing protocol and establishing safeguards for the 500-or-so competitors, coaches and staff who will be inside the snowboard bubble in Aspen.

This year’s bands include eclectic and experimental band tUnE-yArDs, Michigan’s Greensky Bluegrass, the Texas trio Khruangbin and Brooklyn-based Turkuaz.

The concert series starts Wednesday, Feb. 27, and run through Saturday, March 2.

The annual Burton U.S. Open Snowboarding Championships, now in their 37th year, is free and open to the public. Athletes who will be competing this year include Jamie Anderson, Red Gerard and Mark McMorris.

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