The Winter Olympics And The BibleSýnishorn

Olympic Champion Kelly Clark Attributes Life Changing Moment to the Bible

There aren’t many people who can say they’ve seen their greatest dream come true while still in their teens. Kelly Clark, however, is no ordinary person. At the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, she captured the gold medal in the snowboarding halfpipe event just a few months before her 20th birthday.

According to Clark, however, she didn’t truly begin enjoying her success until a few months later thanks to an unexpected introduction to the Bible.

While at a snowboarding event that following season, she was feeling strangely unsatisfied with life and struggled to find a reason to wake up in the morning. That next day, however, she overheard someone consoling a fellow competitor who had crashed during a run. Those works encouraged her to do something she had never done before.

“There has got to be a Bible in the hotel room…there are always Bibles in hotel rooms, right?” Clark explained. “As I started looking at the Bible, I realized that I don’t know where to look or where to start.”

Clark found the girl from earlier in the day and asked her to help her find answers in the Bible. It was a life-changing moment that has stayed with her ever since.

“That was a huge shifting point for me where my snowboarding became this amazing expression and fun thing, rather than this thing that I had to do,” Clark said. “It became this thing that I was made to do and I could actually enjoy, and there was so much freedom in it because I wasn’t doing it to prove to people who I was.”

The Bible so greatly impacted Clark that she began sharing her story in various publications and in the film Purpose where she joined several action sports athletes in quoting Bible verses such as Romans 1:23, Isaiah 53:5, and Ephesians 3:17-19.