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 allowed her to take her classes online. She is studying psychology at the University of Colorado. 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 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.
2015-17
In 2015 she finished second in the Sprint U.S. Grand Prix in Park City, Utah, third in the Burton US Open in Vail, Colorado, and fourth in the X Games in Aspen, Colorado. In 2016 she won a silver medal in the X Games in Aspen, and a bronze medal in the X Games in Oslo, Norway. She was ranked 6th in the 2017 FIS World Cup Halfpipe Standings.
