Arielle Gold

Personal

Gold is Jewish, and was born in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, where she attended Steamboat Springs High School. Her older brother is American Olympian snowboarder Taylor Gold.

She competed in rodeos and horse jumping events, before taking up snowboarding. She lives in Steamboat Springs, where she attended Steamboat Springs High School. She later transferred to the Insight School of Colorado, a full-time online public charter school that allows her to take her classes online. Her father Ken Gold, a former professional moguls skier, videos each of her practices. The family moves to Breckenridge, Colorado, for five months every year, to be closer to competitions.

Snowboarding career

She learned to ski when she was three years old. Her older brother convinced her to switch to snowboarding when she was 7. She said: "Taylor made it look like so much fun". Their father said:

Taylor is, in many ways, responsible for Arielle’s success because he ... told her: 'Look, most of the girls do things the way the other girls do. You need to do things the way the guys do. You need to grab your snowboard, you need to go big, you have style, you need to have aggression in your riding.'

She is a member of the Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club. Her home mountain is Mount Werner in the Park Range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, four miles from Steamboat Springs. She has competed since she was eight years old.

2010–12: Junior World Champion

In 2010, she won the Burton US Open Junior Jam halfpipe contest. In 2011, she won a silver medal at the U.S. Revolution Tour, Copper Mountain, Colorado, United States of America Snowboard and Freeski Association (USASA) National Championships.

In 2012 at the Winter Youth Olympic Games in Innsbruck, Austria, she won silver medals in slopestyle and halfpipe. She then won the gold medal in halfpipe at the FIS Junior Snowboarding World Championships in the Sierra Nevada (Spain), at the age of 15. For 2012, she ranked 14th on the World Snowboard Tour.

2013: World Champion

She won the gold medal in the halfpipe at the FIS Snowboarding World Championships 2013 in Stoneham-et-Tewkesbury, Quebec, Canada, at the age of 16, the second-youngest ever World Championship winner. Later that week, after replacing the injured Gretchen Bleiler, Gold won a bronze medal in the superpipe at the Winter X Games XVII in Aspen, Colorado.

She won the Burton European Open in Laax, Switzerland, came in second in the 2013 Grand Prix in Park City, Utah, in February, and won the bronze medal at X Games Europe in Tignes, France. She ranked second on the 2013 World Snowboard Tour. She also earned a place on the U.S. Snowboarding pro team.

2014: Olympian

Gold was the youngest member of the US 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics halfpipe team at the age of 17, and was considered a medal contender in the Women's halfpipe. But she was not able to compete in the qualification for the Olympic halfpipe finals, because of a separated right shoulder injury suffered on February 12, 2014, when she caught an edge at the end of the pipe during a practice run and crashed at Rosa Khutor Extreme Park in Krasnaya Polyana, Russia, moments before the competition.