To a viewing audience that follows snowboarding largely during the Olympic cycles, a Team USA athlete can emerge as a “surprise sensation” overnight. See: Red Gerard, who, at the 2018 PyeongChang Games, became the youngest American to medal in a snowboarding event at the Olympics, or Chloe Kim, who at those same Games became the youngest woman to win an Olympic snowboarding gold medal. Both were 17.
But the snowboarders Americans see on their screens every four years don’t simply spawn, fully developed, on the national team. They likely started out on the U.S. Snowboard Rookie Team before progressing to the pro team and competing on the World Cup circuit, a season that runs annually from October to March.
Following the World Cup circuit closely can be rewarding come Olympics time, to know the names and backgrounds of the riders selected to compete on the U.S. national team. And while anything can happen in Olympic qualification, one name to know ahead of the 2026 Winter Olympics is Bea Kim.
Kim, 17, is a rapidly rising star on the U.S. Snowboard Halfpipe Team. She is in her third season on the team and her first at the pro level after joining the rookie team in 2022.
Kim took the path to the U.S. team that many snowboarders before her have taken—through the Mammoth Mountain Snowboard Team. Located a little more than five hours north of Rancho Palos Verdes, Kim’s hometown, Mammoth has served as the home mountain of Olympic snowboarders such as Chloe Kim and Maddie Mastro.
From the time she was seven, Kim and her family would head to Mammoth for snowboarding trips once or twice a year. When Kim was nine, however, the course of her life changed dramatically. Her family’s trip to Mammoth coincided with the JLA Banked Slalom event, which she entered “just to see what happens”—and ended up taking bronze.
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Kim quickly shifted her focus from racing to freestyle, honing her skills on jumps and rails and in the halfpipe. When she told her dad, Drew, she wanted to join the Mammoth Mountain Snowboard Team, which trains Wednesday through Sunday, he initially balked at the twice-weekly five-hour drive.
For a few years, the Kims made the drive to Mammoth every other weekend, leaving Friday night and coming home after riding on Sunday. Then Bea (short for Beatrice) joined the weekend team and, when she was 12, received an invitation to join the full-time team.
“That’s when it started to get more serious,” Kim told me at Mammoth Mountain’s Main Lodge during the U.S. Grand Prix in early February. “I became home-schooled as well. It was still on my family to get me here every Wednesday through Sunday, but thankfully my dad is in a position where he’s able to travel with me and work at the same time.”
Three years ago, the U.S. Snowboard Team—well acquainted with the pipeline of talent flowing out of the Mammoth Mountain Snowboard Team—invited Kim to join its rookie team. She competed at that level for two years, picking up a silver at the Junior World Championships and four podiums in the NorAm Cup, before progressing to the pro halfpipe team—just one of four women and one of eight members overall.
In February 2023, Kim got an invitation to her first Dew Tour, which was, at the time, only her second pro-level competition. In her fourth run, she cleanly landed a method air followed by a frontside 720 melon, Cab 540, switch backside 540 and Cab 720 stalefish to bump up into a third-place finish.
“It was definitely a point where I was like, ‘OK, this is happening; you’re getting an invite to this big event,’” Kim said. “It was...not time to kick it into gear, because I was already very focused, but it was a turning point for me.”
This past January, Kim’s career switched into a higher gear once again. She earned her first World Cup halfpipe podium at the LAAX Open with a second-place finish.
She also competed in her first X Games the same month, finishing just off the podium in fourth place.
“The Dew Tours and X Games feel different than the World Cup circuit,” Kim said. “The fans, for one; and it’s a small field—there’s only six to eight girls, compared to a World Cup where you have a qualifier to a final. Those events [Dew Tour and X Games] mean a lot because I watched those when I was little, so it’s surreal to be there.”
In 2022, Kim connected with action sports agent Yulin Olliver at an event organized by Soy Sauce Nation, which began as an online community for Asian Pacific Islander (API) snowboarders but has expanded to a series of in-person events.
At the time, Kim had no official sponsors, and a mentor relationship with Olliver grew into a representation partnership.
“It meant a lot for me to have representation in an agent who was also Asian and also a woman and stands for the same things I do,” Kim said. “Your agent is someone who’s representing you and pitching you to clients, so you want them to really understand you, and I really felt that with Yulin.”
Olliver does an exercise with her clients in which she asks them, if they could wave a magic wand and anything would be possible, what would they want to achieve? Then they work backward from there to make the wishlist happen.
When Olliver asked Kim that question, Kim said that she hoped to compete at an X Games and a Dew Tour. She also wanted to find a board sponsor that felt like family and offered high-level technology.
Today, Kim is sponsored by Nitro Snowboards and Smith Optics and is an ambassador for Hydro Flask and Protect Our Winters (POW), which feeds her passion for sustainability. Indeed, she prefers to buy her clothing secondhand when she’s able and counts vintage shopping as one of her interests off her board.
“I love it because I find unique pieces that not a lot of people have,” Kim said. “I’m trying to find a good scarf, like a wool or mohair scarf, and also a good cardigan, maybe blue or black. Some funky shoes...I always look for the funky shoes. Thrifting is also a sustainable way of shopping and trying not to get involved in fast fashion.”
POW, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that advocates for law reform on environmental issues and climate action, often sees its partner athletes travel to Congress for briefings and lobby days. Kim hasn’t been to D.C. yet but hopes to have a chance to in the future.
“It means a lot to me to work with companies that stand for similar things I do and that have strong representation,” Kim said. “We need to protect where we do our riding, and this is where we have the most fun, so why wouldn’t we do everything we can?”
Kim was disappointed when she realized that she wouldn’t be 18 in time for November’s presidential election. “I miss it by one year, which I’m so upset about, but it just means that all my friends who are older than me have to go out and vote,” she said.
In the precious little free time Kim has outside snowboarding and homeschooling, she enjoys surfing and reading. A voracious reader, some of Kim’s recent titles include Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (“I was bawling my eyes out, but it was so good,” Kim said), Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and a lot of Joan Didion.
If her goal of making the national team comes to fruition, you’ll likely learn these things about Kim in the lead-up to the 2026 Winter Olympics. She has worked hard on being able to spin all four directions in her tricks (frontside, backside, switch backside and switch frontside, or “Cab”), key to making the podium in the current women’s halfpipe snowboarding landscape.
Kim’s highest-level run at the moment—the one she would successfully put down in a contest if all were going right—is a frontside 720 to a Cab 540 to a switch backside 540 to a Cab 720 to a frontside 900. Leading up to the qualification period for Milano-Cortina 2026, she will work on building those tricks into bigger rotations.
Mammoth Mountain has a trampoline facility and airbags in the spring that athletes can train on, building muscle memory for their tricks before bringing them to snow. But being on the U.S. Snowboard Team opens a new world of training opportunities, including an October training camp in Switzerland.
Unlike most of the countries the U.S. competes against globally in freestyle snowboarding—Japan, Australia, Switzerland and China have particularly competitive halfpipe teams—the U.S. team is not funded on a federal level. Athletes rely on fundraising and sponsor support for the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) and U.S. Ski & Snowboard for travel, training, physical therapy, coaching and other support.
Athletes’ individual sponsors are also crucial in this regard—and it’s something of a chicken-and-egg situation. Kim’s career acceleration is due in large part to joining the Nitro Snowboards and Smith Optics teams, but those brands were interested in working with her to begin with because of her results on the snow.
In 2023, the U.S. Snowboard Team also received its first-ever title sponsor in Hydro Flask, a partnership that will run through the 2026 Games and provide the athletes with even more support and funding.
Kim has come a long way—in a very short time—from the days of her family driving five hours to Mammoth on a Friday night and heading home Sunday. Her support systems are in place to make a run for one of her greatest dreams, the Olympics.
As for already being tabbed one of the U.S. halfpipe snowboarders to watch with two years to go until the next Games...it’s all a bit difficult for Kim to wrap her head around. But the 17-year-old has perspective beyond her years.
“I try to take it with grace and humility and be thankful that people are saying that about me, but it just means to put my head down and continue working,” Kim said. “I don’t want to let it get to my head and all of a sudden I’m digressing, so I want to focus on my snowboarding, and everything that comes with it is an added bonus.”
