For the first time in nearly 11 months, Chloe Kim is about to take a truly meaningful run through a halfpipe — and it’s happening at the Olympics.

Not at a warm-up event. Not at a low-stakes World Cup. Not even at a pressure-free qualifier.

At the biggest moment imaginable.

Two days before beginning her bid to win a third straight Olympic gold medal, Kim admitted what even the greatest athletes rarely say out loud.

“I have so much anxiety,” she said Monday. “But thankfully I have matcha and there’s good vibes here and my family’s here, so we’ll be good.”

The 25-year-old American arrived in Italy after a chaotic, injury-filled buildup that would rattle almost anyone. Her Olympic season detoured sharply in mid-January when she injured her shoulder during a training run in Switzerland. Before that, she had barely competed at all.

In fact, Kim has just one scored halfpipe run since last March — a qualifying ride at Copper Mountain in December. She made it through that round cleanly, then fell while preparing for the final, injuring her shoulder again. A month later, just weeks before the Games, the injury worsened.

Now she’s back in the pipe wearing a brace on her left shoulder — something she says oddly helped her riding.

“In a funny way … it made my riding better,” Kim said.

Her coach acknowledged the situation is far from ideal, but emphasized the long view. After 15 years of elite training, Kim knows how to manage chaos. The tricks are there. The body, while not perfect, is holding up. And the riding, he said, is still good enough to compete for gold.

What made this comeback possible was a mental reset that began more than a year ago.

By winning a contest in Aspen in January 2025, Kim locked up her Olympic spot early. That took enormous pressure off her shoulders and allowed her to step away from competition. She went on to win world championships two months later — then stopped. No grind. No constant travel. Just rest and recalibration.

The plan for this season was careful and conservative: heavy training, one competition in December, one in January, then the Olympics. Instead, it became a high-wire act.

The result is that Kim will drop into the Olympic halfpipe with no recent resume to lean on — only belief.

“I feel confident,” she said. “I feel really good about how I’m feeling physically and mentally, and that’s most important right now.”

When healthy, Kim would be the clear favorite, even in a sport evolving at breakneck speed. The biggest threat may come from Gaon Choi, a 17-year-old from Korea who has been rapidly increasing difficulty and could challenge Kim’s historic three-peat.

But Kim has always been the one pushing the ceiling higher.

This week, she plans to attempt a run she’s never landed in competition — a harder, riskier version of the routine that won her gold in Beijing. It features complex combinations of riding backward and forward, spinning in both directions, and linking tricks that demand total commitment.

“If I’m able to pull that off,” Kim said, “regardless of where I place, I’ll be really content with that.”

That mindset may be the most dangerous thing of all — an athlete with nothing to prove, willing to risk everything anyway.