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Chloe Kim is getting her own Barbie doll

Chloe Kim is getting her very own Barbie. (barbie.mattel.com)
Chloe Kim is getting her very own Barbie. (barbie.mattel.com)

Snowboarder Chloe Kim was one of the unquestionable heroes of the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang. She won a gold medal in halfpipe at just age 17, and engaged everyone with her infectious smile and personality. Now that everyone knows her name, the entire world is at her feet. What will she do next?

Well, we don’t quite what Chloe will be doing next, but we know where we’ll be seeing her next: in a box at the toy store. On Tuesday, Barbie introduced 17 new dolls, and one of them was a Chloe Kim doll. It’s actually a great likeness, with blonde and brown hair, a black knit cap, yellow coat, boots, and a snowboard. The doll was introduced as part of Barbie’s 13-doll Shero (she-hero) collection, and Kim isn’t the only athlete. There are seven other women athletes who now have their very own Barbie doll:

  • Nicola Adams Obe, boxer from the United Kingdom and Great Britain’s most successful female boxer of all-time;

  • Misty Copeland, prima ballerina and the first African-American to be appointed to principal dancer;

  • Gabby Douglas, American gymnast, three-time gold medalist, and the first African-American in history to win the individual all-around event at the Olympics;

  • Sara Gama, Italian soccer player and captain of Juventus;

  • Ibtihaj Muhammad, U.S. fencing champion, 2016 bronze medalist at the Rio Olympics, and the first Muslim-American woman to wear a hijab while competing;

  • Hui Ruoqi, Chinese volleyball player;

  • Yuan Yuan Tan, Chinese ballet dancer and the principal dancer of the San Francisco Ballet.

Barbie also announced three dolls in their Inspiring Women series, and doing it just before Thursday’s International Women’s Day was perfect timing. Girls and boys alike will now be able to preorder Barbies modeled after three pioneering women: aviatrix Amelia Earhart, artist Frida Kahlo, and NASA mathematician and physicist Katherine Johnson. (Johnson was one of the women who inspired the movie “Hidden Figures.”)

The point of the entire line of dolls is to give young girls more positive role models. Mattel did a survey of 8,000 mothers around the world, and 86 percent said that they worried about the female role models their daughters were exposed to. These Barbies aim to help that — especially since the dolls are based on real women.

Chloe Kim is having a stupendous 2018 so far. Not only did she win a gold medal at the PyeongChang Olympics, now she’s got her very own Barbie that will inspire kids around the world to follow their dreams — as a snowboarder, or as anything else they want to be.

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Liz Roscher is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email her at lizroscher@yahoo.com or follow her on twitter! Follow @lizroscher

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