The snowfall coming down on Livigno Snow Park on Thursday night helped produce one of the bigger Olympic upsets in snowboard history, as Chloe Kim’s bid to become the first rider to win three consecutive Olympic halfpipe gold medals fell just short.
Kim finished with a best score of 88.00 from her opening run, settling for silver behind surprise winner Choi Gaon of South Korea, whose heroic third run after an early fall earned 90.25 and rewrote the Olympic record books. Japan’s Mitsuki Ono took bronze with 85.00.
For a sport that has spent nearly a decade orbiting Kim’s technical and competitive standard, the result felt seismic – not because she rode poorly, but because someone else finally assembled the perfect combination of risk, execution and timing on the night it mattered most.
The loss ends one of the most dominant Olympic streaks in modern winter sport. Kim entered the Games as a two-time defending Olympic champion and the overwhelming favorite to complete a three-peat no snowboarder had ever achieved. Instead, the history belongs to someone else.
The victory came less than six weeks after Kim dislocated her left shoulder, an injury that threatened to derail her Olympic buildup. Instead, the brace she wore throughout the competition became part of the story: a visible reminder of vulnerability for an athlete who has spent most of her career appearing nearly untouchable. Among those watching from the bottom of the pipe was her boyfriend, NFL star Myles Garrett, stationed near the photo pit with a camera in hand as he tracked each run.
Kim first arrived as a global phenomenon at Pyeongchang 2018, when she became the youngest woman to win Olympic snowboard gold. Four years later in Beijing, she defended the title while navigating the expectations that come with being the face of a sport. In Livigno, the challenge was different: maintaining dominance while the rest of the field spent eight years trying to catch her.
The final unfolded in three distinct phases: Kim setting the benchmark, the field chasing, and Choi delivering the decisive moment.
Kim dropped in late in the start order and immediately established control with a composed opening run built around a backside 720, switch backside air and cab double cork 1080 sequence, finishing with the kind of amplitude and landing precision that judges consistently reward. Her 88.00 put immediate pressure on the rest of the field and held deep into the competition.
Ono secured bronze early with a technically clean but slightly lower-ceiling run that topped out at 85.00, while riders including Japan’s Sara Shimizu and China’s Cai Xuetong pushed difficulty but lost ground on execution or amplitude in a final littered with crashes as snow swirled through the floodlit venue.
Choi’s path to gold was far less straightforward. The 17-year-old World Cup leader – competing in her first Olympics – crashed heavily on her opening run after clipping the lip of the pipe, flipping upside down and landing hard. She lay on the snow for several minutes as medical staff attended to her, briefly raising fears she might withdraw.
She eventually rode down under her own power but later revealed she had hurt her knee in the fall and struggled to walk immediately afterward.
“After the first run, I actually cried really hard, thinking maybe I should just quit the Olympics here,” Choi said. “But the thought kept coming back to me: ‘You can do this. You have to go on.’”
Her second run ended in another fall, leaving her medal hopes hanging by a thread. But on her final attempt – needing something close to perfect – she delivered exactly that, combining speed, amplitude and technical depth across her full line to post 90.25, the highest score of the night.
“It’s the kind of story you only see in dreams,” she said. “Mentally it was so tough, but right now I am the happiest.”
The moment instantly flipped the pressure back to Kim, who still had a final run remaining but now needed to improve. She attempted to raise the difficulty ceiling, including a progression toward back-to-back double cork combinations, but could not put down a cleaner score than her opening benchmark.
The result underscored how narrow the margins have become in women’s halfpipe. Kim still posted the top single score outside Choi and finished comfortably ahead of the rest of the field, but Olympic finals rarely allow room for anything less than perfection.
Choi’s victory also signals a generational shift in a discipline increasingly dominated by teenage progression riders. Born in 2008 and mentored by Kim herself, she represents a new wave raised entirely in the technical ecosystem Kim helped create.
The broader field reflected that evolution. Seven of the top eight finishers were 23 or younger, and multiple finalists attempted double-cork-level difficulty as standard competitive content rather than high-risk bonus tricks.
For Kim, the result does little to diminish a career that has already reshaped the sport. She remains a two-time Olympic champion, three-time world champion and the rider most responsible for pushing the technical baseline of modern women’s halfpipe. She said she will undergo surgery on her shoulder after returning home.
“I haven’t been able to practice as much as I would’ve liked,” Kim said. “A month ago, I wasn’t even sure if I would be here. I get emotional thinking about it. I really worked so hard to get here. This medal means so much to me.”
But on a snowy night in Livigno, the sport finally moved – if only slightly – beyond Kim’s orbit. And for the first time in nearly a decade, Olympic halfpipe gold belonged to someone else.
