By Scott Etkin
A pair of athletes and a coach with ties to Columbia University are joining Team USA at the Winter Olympics in Italy this week, giving Upper West Siders local rooting interests when they tune in to the games.
Bea Kim, 19, who will snowboard in the halfpipe competition, is a proud Columbia Lion, though she’s yet to take a class at the university (she was admitted as an undergraduate to Columbia College last fall but deferred a year in order to prepare for the Olympics).
The demands of her snowboarding career required Kim to do online schooling for high school, only “talking to teachers once in a while,” she told West Side Rag on a Zoom call from Switzerland. She said she’s looking forward to living on campus and immersing herself in “the whole college experience.”
Kim, who has been active with the environmental nonprofit Protect Our Winters, plans to study climate and sustainability at Columbia. Like many incoming freshmen, she doesn’t have a clear picture of her post-graduate career path, beyond a desire to have a positive impact.
“Everything I’ve done, pretty much for the last 10 years leading up to these games, has been for myself, has been for my own success,” said Kim. “I think in a future career, doing something that would hopefully have a larger net and a larger bandwidth to reach more people and have an effect on more people, would mean a lot to me.”
Two years ago, Forbes called Kim “America’s next halfpipe snowboarding star.” But you wouldn’t know it from the unassuming way she speaks about being in the Olympics.
“I am obviously very nervous, and like, nerves slash anxiety, just because it’s my first Olympics. It’s all unknown,” said Kim. “I have no idea what to expect, but I’m trying to go into it with just a very open mind.” (Kim is not related to rival competitor Chloe Kim, one of the biggest stars on Team USA, who is going for her third-straight Olympic gold medal in the snowboard halfpipe.)
When it comes to balancing schoolwork and snowboarding at Columbia, Kim said she has received advice from fellow Olympian and Columbia student, Olivia Giaccio, who is on Team USA’s Ski Team this year.
“The biggest tip she said was, ‘It’s not gonna be easy.’ It’s definitely a little tricky to balance, obviously, the travel and the rigorous course load and what Columbia demands of you,” Kim recalled. “She said, ‘It’s a good challenge, and you’ll learn a lot from yourself.’”
Giaccio graduated from Columbia College with a degree in psychology in 2024 and is now enrolled as a graduate student at Columbia’s School of Social Work. She competed in the 2022 Games in Beijing, finishing 6th in the freestyle moguls.
After the 2022 Olympics, Giaccio initially planned to take time off from skiing and go to Columbia full-time, but she decided to remain committed to her sport while earning her degree. “I still think I have plenty of room left to improve as an athlete, as well as much more I want to do to push the limits of women’s mogul skiing,” she wrote in a blog post from around that time.
The final Lion heading to Italy is Dean Spirito, a Columbia College alum from the class of 2008. Spirito will be coaching freestyle skier Nick Goepper, who is a three-time Olympic medalist.
Goepper’s story is notable in that his previous success has been in the slopestyle event, but in Italy he will compete in the freeski halfpipe. Despite the unusual switch in events, it seems unwise to bet against a man who, in 2014, won an X Games gold medal while skiing with a broken hand and no poles.
The men’s freeski halfpipe begins on Thursday, February 19th, and concludes the next day. Giaccio will take to the slopes beginning on Tuesday, February 10th, with finals in the women’s freestyle moguls event scheduled for the following day. Kim will compete in the two-day snowboarding halfpipe contest beginning on Wednesday, February 11th. The full Winter Olympics schedule is available – HERE.
The Olympics will be broadcast on NBCUniversal networks (NBC, USA, CNBC) and streamed on Peacock. Peacock has live coverage of all events. Cable subscribers can access coverage and highlights through the NBC Sports app or NBCOlympics.com.
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