02/13/2026
🙌🏼❤️ This is what real mentorship and leadership looks like!
You know what most people won’t do?
Help train the person who might one day beat them.
Chloe Kim has been the standard in women’s halfpipe for years. Two Olympic gold medals. The name everyone chases. She raised the bar and kept clearing it.
Today, 17-year-old Choi Ga-on won gold.
And when it was clear Chloe wasn’t getting the historic three-peat after she fell during her final run, she didn’t coast out defeated.
She rode it out smiling.
She hugged bronze medalist Mitsuki Ono first. Then went straight to Ga-on. Wrapped her up in a hug. Biggest smile on her face. No hesitation.
That’s someone watching the future of her sport arrive and cheering for it.
Chloe didn’t just inspire Choi Ga-on from a distance. Chloe and her dad were instrumental in bringing Ga-on to the U.S. to train in the same elite environment, becoming her mentor in the process.
True mentorship is the part of leadership most people talk about but rarely live.
Because mentoring someone who might challenge you feels safe in theory. It feels noble in an interview.
But for many, it feels very different when they actually rise.
It’s easy to mentor someone while you’re still clearly ahead.
But it is harder when they catch you.
And when they pass you?
That’s when true champions and leaders reveal themselves.
They celebrate it.
Chloe Kim did exactly that.
If you can help someone grow strong enough to beat you — and still light up when they do — you weren’t being replaced.
You were building something bigger than yourself.
And that’s the kind of leader the world needs more of.
*Post has been updated to be consistent in referring to both athletes by their first and last name, or first. I appreciate the reader who called me out on it as I defaulted to familiarity bias in my original post.
Chloe Kim Olympics NBC Olympics & Paralympics
