U.S. Olympic champion snowboarder Chloe Kim is really good at Mario Kart.
I’ve been watching Kim wage a fierce Mario Kart World battle against her best friend Austin Cho at the Nintendo store in Midtown Manhattan. Polygon and several other outlets have been invited to meet Kim, test our mettle against her karting skills, and chat with her ahead of the Winter Olympics in February 2026.
The friends have traded a couple victories back and forth before I join them on the couch. Cho is painstakingly comparing kart stats, while Kim chills, ready to go.
“I don’t really care as long as [my character] looks the part,” Kim says. “Look at her, she’s so diva right now.”
She’s playing as Mayor Pauline in a gold sports car, gold as the medals that Kim has won at the Olympic Games — and at the Winter X games, and the snowboarding World Championships, and the Winter Youth Olympics.
Kim has been competing as a snowboarder since the age of six, but she says that Nintendo games were her escape growing up.
“My first console was the DS — I was seven when I got it — and I played so much Mario Kart, so much Pokémon,” she tells me. “I have a weird love for Chikorita.”
She approached Pokémon the same way she approaches Mario Kart: with aesthetics top of mind.
“I just love whatever was cute, and I make it work,” she says. “I’d get other Pokémon to balance out the team if I had a bad starter.”
This year, Kim will return to the Olympic Games after a well-documented journey to find the fun in snowboarding again. She won her first Olympic gold medal when she was 17, which is a feat but not exactly the best way to enter adulthood with chill, laid-back expectations of one’s own ability.
She took time off competing and started going to therapy, trying to unknot the high expectations that had made her dread snowboarding.
“I’ve been really fortunate in my career and I found what worked for me,” she says. “I think that timeline looks different for everyone.”
It’s clear that Kim loves competing — at least, judging from her approach to Mario Kart, where she sits forward on the couch, feet planted and eyes fixed on the wall-sized screen that Nintendo has set up in its Midtown flagship store. We’re using the Nintendo Switch 2 Camera, and our faces are fixed above our characters as we race. Truth be told, I don’t notice it much, because I’m also very competitive, and I’m fighting for my life. For the next seven or so minutes, my interview transcript is full of “oh my gosh” and “no no no no” and “YES!”
When the first race is done, Kim and Cho collapse in laughter, pointing at the screen. She passed me at the very last second of the race, although we’ve both lost.
“We’re actually roommates, so we play all the time,” Kim tells me during the next race, followed by: “Ah, no!” Another shell incident.
As I’m leaving, she turns to Cho and says, “Okay, I need to win.”