Gaon
Choi

Gaon won Women’s Snowboard SuperPipe gold as a rookie at XG Aspen 2023, at age 14. That broke Chloe Kim’s record for youngest XG SuperPipe champ as well as made her Korea’s first and only X Games gold medalist. We’ve seen her coming, though. She was undefeated in the halfpipe in her first year of junior-level FIS competition in 2022 and won the first World Cup event she entered, at Copper Mountain in 2023. Gaon says she’s been inspired and mentored throughout her life by 8-time X Games gold medalist Kim: they first met when Chloe competed at the 2017 Olympic test event in PyeongChang, and Chloe and her father helped bring Gaon to the U.S. to train with the Mammoth Mountain development team. Now 17 headed into XG Aspen 2026, she already has 4 World Cup wins to her name, three of which she earned in the past two months!