While a wave of anti-Asian violence does not dry up in the United States, the American snowboarder Chloe Kim revealed Wednesday to be the victim of racist insults because of her Asian origins.
In a TV interview on ESPN, she even said she was worried about her safety.
“It is not because I am a professional athlete or because I won the Games that I am protected from racism.
I get maybe thirty messages a day ”.
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To walk her dog or go shopping, the young Olympic champion now travels with, in her handbag, a Taser, a pepper spray and a knife.
On Wednesday, Kim posted a screenshot of one of these messages, received earlier on Instagram: “I get hundreds of them every month and I'm very sad that people might think such behavior. is okay, ”she wrote in the accompanying message.
“Being a professional athlete doesn't protect me from racism,” says Chloe Kim on her Instagram account.
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The 20-year-old and crowned 2018 Olympic champion in the halfpipe discipline, Kim was born in California to parents from South Korea.
Insults from his teenage years
Anti-Asian slurs have haunted her ever since she won a silver medal at the 2014 X Games in Aspen, when she was still a teenager: “There were messages telling me to go back to China and not. not take medals from the white girls on the team ”.
Kim noticed that anti-Asian slurs have picked up again since the start of the Covid-19 epidemic and statements by former US President Donald Trump on the “Chinese virus”.
Sometimes she feels like "everyone" "hates" her because she is of Asian descent.
