It’s not just Chloe Kim reaping the benefits of her snowboarding career.
The two-time Olympic gold medalist, 25, was only four years old when she began snowboarding, and spent her third and fourth grade years training in Geneva, Switzerland, before returning to California and training at Mammoth Mountain.
By the time she was seven years old, her dad Jong Jin Kim quit his job so he could support her budding snowboarding career, and by the time she was 15 years old, she was able to retire both her parents.
Chloe, speaking on the Not Skinny But Not Fat podcast, first recalled moving out of her parents home when she was 18 years old. “Not because — like I love my parents to death — I just liked my own space. And they are so busy all the time, it stressed me out.”
“Also my parents don’t work, I was able to retire both of them by the time I was 15,” she said. Chloe’s father previously worked in both engineering and real estate, and her mother, Boran Yun Kim, worked for Korean Airlines in LAX.
Her dad quit his job when she was seven years old, which host Amanda Hirsch called a “risk,” however Chloe maintained: “But it was going to pay off, you best believe.”
© Getty Images“It was really dumb, like in hindsight, it was the dumbest thing you could do, but he did it and it worked out, thank god,” she continued.
Noting that though she “didn’t know” what quitting one’s job really meant when she was seven years old, she said: “I feel like my dad was telling me that he would support me, and I was like, ‘Cool.'”
Chloe also emphasized that she did not grow up with money, and moreover she “didn’t know that there was money in snowboarding, there really wasn’t and there isn’t really,” adding that the only person she knew managed to amass significant wealth from the sport was Shawn White, who was also a skateboarder.
© Instagram“For me as a woman, as an Asian-American … I didn’t see that, [I thought] ‘I’m never going to get the same opportunity as anyone,'” she said. “So when I started doing really well, and making money, I was like damn.”
© Getty ImagesChloe also noted that much of the money came from sponsorships, and recalled her first big partnership being with Monster Energy. “I’m still with them, and that contract changed my life, it was six figures.”
“I retired my parents when I became a millionaire,” Chloe confirmed, maintaining: “It’s such an honor and a privilege to do that for my parents, they took such a big risk for me, and so to be able to get my mom out of a really [expletive] work environment was awesome.”
Read the full article here
