US Olympic snowboarder Chloe Kim is really good at Mario Kart.
I watched Kim fight a tough fight. World of Mario Kart battle your best friend Austin Cho at the Nintendo store in midtown Manhattan. Polygon and several other outlets were invited to meet Kim, test her karting skills and chat with her ahead of the Winter Olympics in February 2026.
The friends exchanged a few wins before I joined them on the couch. Cho painstakingly compares the kart's stats while Kim relaxes, ready to go.
“I don't care bye [my character] looks the part,” says Kim. “Look at her, she’s such a diva now.”
She plays Mayor Polina in a gold sports car, as gold as the medals Kim won at the Olympics – and the X Winter Games, and the Snowboard World Championships, and the Winter Youth Olympics.
Kim has been competing in snowboarding since she was six, but says Nintendo games were her lifesaver as a child.
“My first console was a DS—I was seven when I got it—and I played so much Mario Kart, so much Pokémon,” she tells me. “I have a strange love for Chikorita.”
She approached Pokémon the same way she approached Mario Kart: by prioritizing aesthetics.
“I just like anything that’s cute and I make it work,” she says. “If I had a bad starter, I'd ask other Pokémon to balance out the team.”
Kim will return to the Olympics this year after a well-documented trip to enjoy snowboarding again. She won her first Olympic gold medal when she was 17, which is a feat but not the best way to enter adulthood with cold, laid-back expectations of your abilities.
She took a break from competing and began going to therapy to try to let go of the high expectations that made her afraid of snowboarding.
“I’ve been very lucky in my career and found something that has helped me,” she says. “I think this graph looks different for everyone.”
It's clear that Kim loves to compete—at least judging by her approach to Mario Kart, where she sits forward on the couch, feet up, eyes fixed on the wall-sized screen Nintendo has installed at its Midtown flagship store. We use the Nintendo Switch 2 camera and our faces are captured over the characters during the race. To be honest, I don't really notice it because I'm also very competitive and fighting for my life. For the next seven minutes, the transcript of my interview is full of “oh my god!”, “no, no, no, no” and “YES!”
When the first race is over, Kim and Cho collapse with laughter, pointing at the screen. She overtook me in the very last second of the race, although we both lost.
“We’re actually roommates, so we play all the time,” Kim tells me during the next race, and then, “Oh, no!” Another incident with a shell.
As I leave, she turns to Cho and says, “Okay, I need to win.”
