That fall, she announced that she had enrolled at Princeton.

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

She took physics, French, history and dropped a chemistry course because it was too hard, she said. Her favorite class was anthropology. She joined the equestrian club for a bit — she found that she did not fit in, she said — and lived alone.

“I didn’t want a roommate,” she said. “What if my roommate was crazy and, like, posted pictures of me sleeping or something?”

But she was determined to fit in, attending parties, football games and campus events. Kezia Dickson, a student from New York, vaguely knew who Kim was. She saw people stare at Kim in the dining hall. She heard them whisper, “Oh, my God, that’s Chloe Kim,” as Kim played pool.

Dickson sensed how uncomfortable it must be. She introduced herself and, at some point, mentioned that she was struggling in French, a language familiar to Kim.

“Chloe gave me her phone number and was like, ‘I really like chatting with you, and if you ever need help in French, just reach out to me,’” Dickson recalled. “I did, and she actually answered the phone. And then we went to the library and she tutored me for three hours. And she would do it every other week.”

Kim was drawn to people who knew little about snowboarding.

“She was really trying to branch out, and the people that she’s remained close with are nothing like her in terms of experiences,” Dickson said. “That’s what she appreciated — getting to know people for their experiences, and not what they’re trying to accomplish.”

The coronavirus pandemic closed down the campus in March 2020, late in Kim’s freshman year.

“Well, Princeton thank you for everything for real,” Kim wrote on Twitter. “I feel like college has taught me so many things I couldn’t get through snowboarding and I am so grateful I took a step back to give myself this experience.”

The public health crisis took a toll. Sequestered in her apartment, without the structure and distraction of school or snowboarding, Kim fell into a funk of loneliness and worry, she said.

“My boyfriend had to make me stop watching the news, because I would literally sit in front of the TV and cry,” Kim said. “I didn’t really know what the symptoms of depression were — I just thought it meant you were sad, which is not the case. But I had other symptoms. I was really tired all the time. I slept a lot. I wasn’t motivated to do anything. It was hard for me to get out of bed and go take care of myself.”

Among her worries were her parents, Jong Jin and Boran. Kim worried about them contracting Covid-19 and about the emerging wave of assaults against Asian Americans.

In an as-told-to essay for espn.com in April, Kim said that she worried “every time my parents step out the door” that they might be attacked.

Kim spent a childhood trying to glide past her race, just trying to fit in. The break from snowboarding has altered her perspective.

She now thinks of all the insults, intentional or not, she has endured and ignored — from countless comments on social media to an incident in a restaurant years ago, when a group of men laughed at her with her family, surprised the little girl could speak English so well.

“I started to get numb to it, and that’s a problem, right?” Kim said. “I’ve recently started to realize that it’s not something that I should have ever had to get used to. It shouldn’t happen.”

Last spring, she joined the soccer player Alex Morgan, the basketball player Sue Bird and the swimmer Simone Manuel in launching a media and commerce company called Togethxr, where “representation and equality is the norm.”

Snowboarding does not have a rich history of diversity, which Kim had noted in the ESPN essay.

“That becomes isolating, too,” she wrote last spring. “My friends and teammates were supportive, but I just didn’t feel comfortable speaking about it because they couldn’t fully understand my experience. I never felt I could talk to anyone, and then being in the spotlight at a young age put me in another difficult situation. I feel very stuck sometimes.”

The present tense was not a typo. Last summer, Kim began weekly therapy sessions.

“I’m giving you a layer or two of the onion,” she said. “My therapist gets the whole onion, to the core.”

Last summer, she and Berle moved into a new and modern home on the west side of Los Angeles, not far from the beach. Her parents moved into her old apartment a few blocks away. It was a relief to have them close again. She sees them nearly every day.

“If I’m hungry or craving mom’s food, I’ll call my mom,” Kim said.

‘A legacy athlete’

At a gym in West Hollywood, Chloe Kim works out under the direction of Roy Chan. They connected in November 2020, the calendar churning toward the next Winter Olympics.

The focus remains on strength and balance in the joints and the core. In the air, Kim rotates like a gymnast. Then she falls from 30 or more feet (the lip is 22 feet above the bottom of the halfpipe) and lands with her feet strapped in place. It is not uncommon for ribs to pop out of place.

“She’s very, very flexible, like hyper-mobile,” Chan said. “Her ability to contort and twist her body allows her to do all the tricks. We’ve got to make sure there is enough core stability to sustain impact.”

Chan is now part of Kim’s close circle, another recent friend from outside of snowboarding. He, too, wishes that she would show the world more of her personality — “in two words, she’s very kind and very funny,” he said — and knows that Kim wants to be known as more than a snowboarder.

“We talk about this a lot,” he said. “We both know that right now, this is the platform. She needs to continue to win. It’s just part of her legacy, and we’re talking about a legacy athlete here.”

Since her return to competition in January she has mostly fended off attention, knowing it is about to come, welcomed or not. She has not posted on Twitter in more than a year, and is a sporadic user of Instagram.

It is revealing that her most notable public appearance of the past couple of years may have been in disguise, on “The Masked Singer.” She made a surprisingly good showing, dressed as a jellyfish crooning Crazy, made famous by Patsy Cline.

Another appearance came on Sesame Street, playing herself in a skit about snowboarding with Big Bird.

That is the Kim who will re-emerge this winter in the public consciousness — goofy, daring, charming — but in charge, as much as she can be.

“I’m not anywhere close to a gold medal,” Brolin Mawejje, a snowboarder competing for Uganda who has become friends with Kim, said. “But having set my path within snowboarding, every once in a while you feel that pressure of, OK, people want something and I don’t know if I can offer everything. No one understands what you’re going through, but they’re quick to judge you based on something like winning a medal.”

Kim’s athletic trajectory echoes that of Shaun White, a former teen sensation, now 35. Most know White as an Olympic snowboarder, a three-time gold medalist trying to make his fifth Winter Games, but he spent much of the time between working to be something else — a skateboarder, a musician, an entrepreneur, an anonymous friend and family member.

“When I was younger, I wanted to be more than I was at that time,” he said. “It’s very hard to live in that situation, because it means that no matter how well things go, you still are feeling like you want more, and you want something different.”

Now he views snowboarding as a bonus, he said, something fun he gets to do.

Maybe Kim will compete deep into her 30s. Or maybe she will slide away from snowboarding after these Olympics. She does not say. She is unlikely to return to Princeton. Most of her friends there would be gone, she pointed out.

For now, it is all about the Olympics again. Kim spent much of October in Switzerland, along with dozens of other top snowboarders and winter athletes, training on a glacier above Saas-Fee. Day after day, working with coach Rick Bower, she practiced in the halfpipe.

She also joked with friends, played games with American teammates and seemed happy to be back in the game.

But there were no judges and there was no audience. It was snowboarding without expectations. She might as well have been dressed in a jellyfish costume, or taking classes in New Jersey, or riding a horse with her boyfriend.

She is about to reappear: Chloe Kim, the gold medalist, unpaused for our entertainment.