Chloe Kim leaves Milan Cortina with silver instead of a three peat, but her three medal Olympic run still hits harder than most careers. (Image via Getty)

On a snowy night in Livigno, Italy, Chloe Kim led the women’s halfpipe final after an 88.00 opener, then watched 17 year old Gaon Choi snatch gold with a 90.25 on her last run. Kim fell on her own final attempt and settled for silver at the 2026 Winter Olympics.This was the shot at a once in a lifetime headline: the first three straight Olympic golds in any snowboarding event. Instead, Kim walks away with three Olympic medals total, two gold and one silver, and remains the only woman with back to back halfpipe titles while Shaun White still stands as the only rider with three golds overall.

2026: A torn shoulder, a silver medal, and a different kind of win

A month before Milan Cortina, Kim tore the labrum in her left shoulder during training in Switzerland and admitted she was unsure she would even make it to the Games.She still qualified first, then played it safe on her opening run in Livigno, banking that 88.00 while other riders slammed in heavy snow. Choi crashed hard in her first run, needed treatment in the pipe, then came back to land the run of the night and grab gold on her third attempt.Kim had a choice on that last drop: repeat the cleaner, safer first run or throw the hardest combo on her sheet, including the cab double 1080 that has defined her progression. She chose violence. She caught the wall, slid out, and the three peat vanished.Even then, she refused to mope. “In my eyes, I’m a winner, because I was able to persevere and fight through,” she told reporters, per Time. On the way down the hill she walked hand in hand with boyfriend Myles Garrett of the Cleveland Browns, who called watching her ride “exciting but terrifying.”She is expected to undergo shoulder surgery once she is back in the United States.

2018: Chloe Kim turns PyeongChang into a launchpad

Kim did not arrive in PyeongChang as a mystery. She already had X Games golds and had become the first woman to land back to back 1080s in competition.At 17, she turned that hype into something concrete, winning women’s halfpipe gold with a 93.75, then nearly touching perfection with a 98.25 on her final run. She became the youngest woman to win Olympic snowboarding gold and the youngest to land two 1080s in a row at the Games, jumping past Kelly Clark’s age record in the process.

2022: Beijing cements the back to back halfpipe champion

Four years later in Beijing, Kim arrived with fame, pressure, and time away from the sport behind her. She qualified first, then ended the final early with a 94.00 on her opening run in Genting Snow Park.Her last two attempts turned into lab experiments. She tried new tricks, fell both times, and still won by a margin that made everyone else look like they were fighting for silver. That result made her the first woman ever to win back to back Olympic halfpipe golds.

Where Chloe Kim sits now in snowboarding history

There is still no true three peat in Olympic snowboarding. Kim’s silver joins failed bids this week from Ester Ledecka in parallel giant slalom and Anna Gasser in big air, both of whom also saw their runs at a third straight gold shut down in Milan Cortina.Kim’s resume is already in rare air: three Olympic medals, eight X Games golds and a stack of world titles, plus progression tricks like the double cork 1080 and a historic 1260 that moved the entire field’s ceiling.So yes, the golden three peat story died in the Italian snow. But the bigger picture is ugly for everyone else: even on a torn shoulder, even on a night when a teenager finally beat her, the bar in this sport still has Kim’s name on it.