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American Chloe Kim reacts during the women's halfpipe final at the Beijing Olympics, on Feb. 10.Lee Jin-man/The Associated Press

They put the security checkpoint in the lobby of our hotel. You don’t screen in. You get screened out. This is how you enter “the loop.” It precludes the need to get your bag metal-detected at every arena.

Four young women run the checkpoint at our place. Teenagers, maybe. Between the headgear and the frumpy guard uniforms, it’s hard to tell.

They are trapped in the loop with the rest of us, which may explain why they seem to be on duty 24 hours a day.

Their busy time is in the morning. No talking, and you get a proper going over.

The rest of the day, they do three things.

They take turns pretzelling themselves around a single, portable radiator. They scroll their phones. And they sleep unashamedly, sprawled out in chairs, often spread across one another’s laps. Mostly, they look bored out of their minds.

These four stalwarts represent for me the spirit of Beijing 2022.

They’re not here to have a life-changing global experience. They’re here to do their jobs to a minimally acceptable level and get out the other end of this in one piece.

This sort of grim approach is on display everywhere here. Athletes crying in isolation hotels and in mixed zones. Officials and coaches spitting mad about unfair application of the rules. The usual rubes moaning about sustainability and bad political actors and lack of accountability and whatever else. If you got a grievance, brother, this is the place for you to air it. The International Olympic Committee welcomes all comers.

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Kim took two years off and came back to win gold in Beijing.ATHIT PERAWONGMETHA/Reuters

Then along comes Chloe Kim and, for the first time here, you see some light penetrating the early 21st-century gloom.

Back in the 2018 Pyeongchang Games, Kim was the kid who didn’t know how good she was.

Knee-high to a grasshopper, popping into the snowboard halfpipe like she was jumping off the deck of a pirate ship. Only 17 years old at the time, she represented everything the Olympics wanted to be in business with: youth, multicultural vibrancy, good vibes all around.

Kim had that weird sort of enthusiasm that was a lot, but never got on your nerves. She was the sort of person who could tweet “I’m getting hangry” a couple of minutes before she competed and not come off as contrived.

She managed to do the hardest thing for any global brand in the form of a human being: be authentic.

Shortly after winning snowboard halfpipe gold in Pyeongchang, Kim disappeared for 22 months. During that time, she says she never touched a snowboard. She didn’t feel the need to declare that it had all become too much and that she was taking a mental break from sport. She just took one.

At the beginning of 2021, she returned.

Some Olympic sports don’t evolve much. There is no innovative new way to do shotput. But the X-Games portion of the Olympic program is in constant flux.

In the big air final the other day, two women nailed a trick that had never been done in competition before. They finished 1-2.

Canadian Megan Oldham placed fourth. Afterward, Oldham was bemused. You could see her processing in real time that the sport had just progressed, at least temporarily, beyond the reach of her ability.

Kim took two years off and somehow came back better.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the pressure that is put on great performers to perform. Simone Biles’s conscientious objection defined the Summer Olympics in Tokyo last year. Mikaela Shiffrin’s yips may yet define this one.

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Kim cruised through Thursday’s halfpipe final, putting up a first score of 94.00.MIKE BLAKE/Reuters

Kim finds herself in a similar philosophic boat. She also feels the doubts. She’s also been to some dark places. And she will also happily talk about it. But her issues don’t appear to affect her ability to perform on the day.

Despite being as hyped as anyone here and having only one chance to get it right, Kim cruised through Thursday’s final. The first score she put up – 94.00 – was so unassailable that she treated the next two runs as a bit of a goof. Her second gold medal was already in the bag.

After her second attempt, she found her buddy Eileen Gu in the crowd and gave her a hug. The world’s sports marketing gravity shifted so abruptly that small tremors were felt in offices up and down Madison Avenue.

An hour after it was over, Kim was normal. In this milieu, that’s hard to do.

When the first question was in Mandarin, Kim went fishing around for her translation earpiece.

“Is this on?” she wondered. Then, after she heard a voice speaking, “Is this always on?”

Lofted up a softball question about facilities, she launched a treatise about the touristic delights of the closed loop: biking, table tennis, pool, a “crazy virtual reality zone that’s so much fun.”

“The gym was upstairs,” Kim concluded. “I never stepped foot in there, but I applaud those who did. I was very happy sitting on the couch or laying in bed when I wasn’t doing anything exciting.”

Chloe Kim, the people’s champion.

Like any human, Kim is a complicated tapestry. Some athletes and commentators seem to think this is new news.

Kim’s self-awareness – knowing she is famous, realizing fame can be a trap, not resenting others for landing in a trap she keeps walking back into – is what sets her apart. She is the rare elite athlete who is wide open, reflective and thoughtful, but doesn’t treat her work like she’s out there curing diseases for a living.

There is plenty of need to talk about complicated human issues in sport. I’m not sure they need to be talked about every time any major athlete opens their mouth in a place like this. That would seem to be creating a whole different set of expectations of athletes. Perhaps the new one isn’t much better than the old one. There were still a few questions asked about sport, rather than the experience of sporting. Someone asked Kim how many new things she’d tried out there and not managed to land on the final two runs.

“I’m super-bummed I couldn’t land [one of them] because I thought I had that trick on lock,” Kim said. “But yeah, it’s okay. It’s all good …” – and here her voice rose and you could not help but feel the excitement rise in you as well – “ … I’ll do it!”

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