Chloe Kim did it again, soaring to another Olympic gold medal in the halfpipe.
Just as she did four years ago, she opened the competition on Thursday by landing a score that no one could top. Kim knew it, too. When she got to the bottom of her first run, she put her hands to her head, fell on her knees in joy and laughed, as if she had shocked even herself.
The performance came after an uncharacteristically bad warm-up, in which Kim struggled to land her primary routine. Her coaches said she was fighting off nerves. Kim said she had arrived to the final “in a weird head space.”
Her outburst at the bottom was a mix of joy and relief.
“I was like, I don’t want to feel all this pressure of not being able to land my first safety run,” she said….
