Eileen Gu, an 18-year-old skier born and raised in the United States, brings together several attributes to become the great sensation of the Beijing-2022 Winter Olympics. Starting with the fact that she is a home athlete. Yes, Gu will compete in the Games as a representative of China, his mother’s home country.
Nationality is not the only curious aspect about the young phenomenon of skiing, which already has a series of achievements, sponsors and in recent years has been divided with excellence between sport and studies, as well as work as a model.
Learn more about Eileen Gu and why you have yet to hear much about her.
Early titles in series
The Beijing Games, starting on February 4, will be the first mega-event of Gu’s career, but in recent years she has shown the reasons why she will arrive at the competition with a bang.
The Chinese competes in freestyle skiing, a discipline that will bring together 13 events in Beijing-2022. It is possible for Gu to participate in three of them: halfpipe, slopestyle and big air. All are tests of grades, in which athletes are evaluated for their maneuvers and technical skills.
In 2021, she won two gold medals at the Aspen World Championships, in the halfpipe and slopestyle (a sport reminiscent of street skateboarding, with ramps, tables and handrails), as well as a bronze medal in big air (jumping mode). . It was an unprecedented performance in the sport, achieved even with a fractured finger.
In the same year, the young woman also became the first woman to win three medals in her first appearance at the X Games and the first athlete from China to be champion of the traditional extreme sports event.
In 2020, Gu competed in the Lausanne Youth Olympic Games and also won three medals, two golds (halfpipe and big air) and one silver (slopestyle).
Choose for China amid tension with the US
Eileen Gu was born in San Francisco, California in 2003. She was raised by her mother and grandmother, both Chinese, and became fluent in both English and Mandarin.
Gu’s mother Yani, who migrated to the US to study and was also a skier, supported her daughter’s career. During the athlete’s growth, the family continued to travel to China frequently.
In June 2019, at age 15, Gu announced his decision to compete for the host country of the Winter Games. “I am proud of my heritage and equally proud of my American upbringing. The opportunity to help inspire millions of young people where my mother was born is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help promote the sport I love,” he said in an Instagram post at the time. .
The choice made her a winter sports celebrity in two giant markets, but it also sparked controversy and attacks on social media.
As China’s policy is not to recognize cases of dual citizenship, the question of whether to maintain its US citizenship was left in the air. Recently, The Wall Street Journal tried to hear from Gu’s team on the topic, but got no response.
The diplomatic phrase that the skier likes to use on the subject is: “When I’m in the US, I’m American; when I’m in China, I’m Chinese.”
According to the WSJ, data is not available on how many US citizens renounced their citizenship to become Chinese, but it is rare for Americans to renounce their citizenship in general, as the country allows them to retain it when acquiring a new one.
What makes Gu’s story even more curious is that the US and China are experiencing considerable political, economic and social tension.
Joe Biden’s government, like those of other allied nations, will diplomatically boycott the Beijing Games, without sending political representatives to the country for the event. The measure is treated as a response to human rights violations committed by the Chinese dictatorship, especially against the ethnic minority of Uighurs in Xinjiang.
Future in politics?
I’m really interested in getting involved in some government policy, maybe as an ambassador to China, because I have some cultural experience between the two countries. Obviously, I’m bilingual. So I think this can be really exciting for me after skiing and modeling and all the things I want to do when I’m young. I have a lot of time to find out
dedicated student
In the documentary series “Everyday Eileen”, produced by Red Bull about the athlete’s life, the skier says that studies have always been a priority for her family. She is grateful to have stayed in a traditional school instead of migrating to distance learning or schools inside ski academies, as other up-and-coming athletes do.
“It was important to be in a class where nobody skied and knew what I was doing. I wasn’t Eileen skiing, I was just Eileen from math class, and that was good,” she said.
His student performance is as remarkable as his achievements in sport. In 2020, she completed two academic years compressed into one to be able to anticipate the end of her high school equivalent in time to prepare exclusively for the Beijing Games.
Before that, the Chinese did not ski more than 65 days a year. Your competitors usually train twice as long.
Dedication to studies paid off. Her SAT score (a kind of Enem in the USA) was among the best in the country and made her accepted at Stanford University, an achievement that the athlete already dreamed of long before dreaming of the Olympics. Gu intends to start his academic life this year, after the sports season.
magazine layer
On the athlete’s Instagram profile, she lists her main skiing achievements and also the fact that she is a model represented by IMG Models.
Gu has been on the cover of Elle and Vogue magazines and has done work for big brands such as Tiffany, Louis Vuitton and Victoria’s Secret.
In 2019, she attended Paris Fashion Week at the invitation of a Chinese brand.
“I think it’s really important to have a full life and be able to do a lot of different things. I went to Paris Fashion Week in 2019, which was probably the best week of my life… No offense, skiing!” Gu told the Olympics. with.
Activism against xenophobia
The Chinese woman wants her own multicultural experience to serve as an example to combat xenophobia. She usually takes a stand against the prejudice and violence suffered by the Asian population in the US, a problem that was accentuated in the pandemic.
On her Instagram, there is a fixed tab with the stories she has already published on the subject, as well as messages in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
“It was not the pandemic that created these problems. They have always existed and are now revealed on a grand scale,” he said in one of the posts.
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