COVER STORY This issue: The real Chloe Kim is ready for her moment four years after becoming a breakout star, the snowboarding prodigy is bringing her full self to Beijing. After Chloe Kim returned home from the 2018 Olympics in South Korea, she put her gold medal in what felt at the time like the right place: a trash bin at her parents’ house. “I hated life,” Kim, now 21, recalls over plates of pad thai in the airy four-bedroom home in the west side of Los Angeles she shares with her boyfriend, skateboarder Evan Berle…To understand the world we live in, read TIME.

On The Line. Born in the U.S. and skiing for China, Eileen Gu navigates the road to Beijing. Eileen Gu got into extreme sports because of an overprotective mother. The older Gu hated seeing her daughter plunge down California’s Tahoe ski slopes in a furious blur, so she enrolled the 8-year-old in free-skiing school, not knowing exactly what it entailed but confident that anything would be safer than racing. Little did she know that she would one day be watching her child perform death-defying flips, spins and jumps instead…

Poisoned by the State. Labeled an extremist. From his prison cell, Alexei Navalny is still fighting for political change in Russia. Navalny takes part in a court session from prison on Dec. 28. Russia has designated his foundation an extremist group. On a cold morning in November, the family of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, made the trip out to visit him at Penal Colony No. 2. The drive from Moscow took about two hours, though parts of it felt like traveling back in time. Coming off the highway from Russia’s high-tech capital, the roads became rutted…