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China’s American-Born Olympic Star Is Being Very Careful
Teenage freestyle skier Eileen Gu is the daredevil face of Xi Jinping’s winter sports initiative and a sponsor’s dream: a gold-medal contender with no desire to talk politics.
28 January 2022, 05:00 GMT+8
Photo Illustration: 731; Photographer: Christian Pondella/Red BullThe enormous, curved, gleaming silver building resembles a spaceship that’s come gently to rest in the northwest of Chengdu. It’s July, hot, and humid. Inside the spaceship, though, visitors stifle shivers and watch their breath condense into puffs of vapor. They’re at Sunac Snow Park, a gigantic indoor ski resort that opened in the summer of 2020. The refrigerated complex, built to host about 4,000 skiers and snowboarders, features an artificial hill that slopes upward at least a couple hundred feet, two chairlifts, and three ski runs. There’s also a circular track for ice bicycling (think little bikes on a skating rink) and an open space for ice bumper cars.
China’s citizens have never really showed much interest in skiing. As recently as 1996, the entire country had just six ski resorts. Then winter sports got an official push from the government. In 2015, as part of Beijing’s successful bid to host this year’s Winter Olympics, President Xi Jinping vowed that by the time the games began, China would have 300 million people engaging in winter sportsannually. (Something was lost in the translation of the official slogan of the government’s pro-sports campaign: “Three Hundred Million People Enter the Ice and Snow.”) From 2015 to 2020, the number of ski resorts in China rose from 568 to 715, and there are now dozens of indoor facilities like Sunac.
Gu competing in Calgary in 2020.
Photographer: Allison Seto/Red Bull
For all the government’s planning, though, the country’s greatest source of snow-sport inspiration might have fallen into its lap. The small crowd is here to watch Eileen Gu, an American-born 18-year-old, take part in a ski-tricks show. Gu is a freestyle skier whose victories at last year’s X Games and world championships have made her a favorite to win three events at next month’s Olympics. Her events are the halfpipe, in which skiers string together a handful of tricks judged by technical prowess, creativity, and overall flair; slopestyle, which starts with skateboarder-style twists on metal railings, followed by three consecutive big-jump ramps that provide opportunities for more elaborate tricks; and big air, a set of three attempts at one massive jump, in which competitors keep their best score of the three.
China Bets on Star Skier Eileen Gu During 2022 Games
China Bets on Star Skier Eileen Gu During 2022 Games
At the snow park, Gu’s fans have thrown parkas over their T-shirts to watch her and some fellow Olympic-class skiers engage in a series of friendly 1-on-1 trick battles. It’s one of her first public ski outings since she fractured a finger and tore a ligament in her thumb a few months earlier, so she isn’t holding poles as she rides down pipes and rails, then shoots up off the snow, spins, and grabs her skis in midair. Still, her tricks are impressive, if a bit conservative. Afterward, Gu, dressed in a hot pink ski jacket, musters fresh smiles for dozens of teenage fans seeking selfies, a younger child who wants to play Legos with her, and a posed photo with a box of Red Bull, one of her major sponsors. One onlooker, Si Junying, says Gu inspired her to start skiing. Another fan, a snowboarder named Li Xianzhe, says Gu could be the “spiritual leader” who makes snow sports a mainstream Chinese pastime.
Gu has also been the subject of intense attention because her personal story lies at the intersection of simmering international tensions. Born Gu Ailing in San Francisco to a Chinese mom and an American dad, she grew up in the U.S. and spent her summers in China. She was eligible to compete for either country, but in 2019, at age 15, she chose China. That was a “very good choice,” Li says. “China is comparatively weak in snow sports,” he adds. “Chinese skiers need an idol like her.”
Enjoying a win in California on Jan. 8.
Photographer: Christian Pondella/Red Bull
Gu is the story China wants to tell about this year’s games, and events like the Chengdu show can’t help but feel engineered. She’s skiing over artificial powder underneath lights instead of sky, feeling still air instead of wind. Some of this is due to the local environment—Beijing will be the first Olympic host city to rely entirely on machine-made snow—and some owes to the political climate.
That same day at Sunac, Gu sits at a table in a hotel ballroom across from a gaggle of mostly Chinese journalists and answers presubmitted questions about her training schedule, her hobbies, and whether she likes spicy food. “It’s so fun to ski indoors—it’s stunning to get on a chairlift in an indoor facility,” she says in fluent Mandarin. The Q&A doesn’t broach one particular Q: What does she see as her role in the ongoing political drama between China and the U.S.?
American politicians including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Republican Senator Mitt Romney were already calling for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics. The U.S. is among several countries that have accused China of committing genocide against Uyghurs and other, mostly Muslim, ethnic groups. Human-rights advocates estimate that China has sent more than 1 million Uyghurs to prison camps over the past few years, and reports from those camps have detailed incidents of forced labor, sexual abuse, torture, and sterilization.
Tensions escalated further this past November, when Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai disappeared for weeks after detailing a decade-long sexual relationship with a top Communist Party official, including an episode that raised concerns she’d been coerced into sex. Eventually, Shuai reappeared and denied having ever made the allegations, but international tennis officials maintain she was forced to do so under duress. The U.S. and at least three other countries have agreed to a diplomatic boycott of the Olympics. That won’t stop any athletes from competing but means political leaders won’t be attending the games.
Gu hasn’t said anything publicly about any of this. She’s marketing skiing to China and China to the world, and she can’t help but know that taking a stand could cost her dearly. The year she joined Team China, Daryl Morey, then the general manager of the NBA’s Houston Rockets, likely cost the league hundreds of millions of dollars by tweeting support for pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.
Gu’s silence has made her something of a screen onto which others project their hopes and views. Chinese fans want to see her collect an armful of medals and affirm that their country can be a place for ski champions. Sponsors want to profit from her growing star power. Activists criticize her silence on China’s abuses.
Repping Chinese dairy brand Mengniu.
Photographer: Fred Lee/Getty Images
This past year, Gu, who declined interview requests over the past several months, has confined her public presence mostly to sponsored photos and videos and, of course, competitions. When she’s in front of the camera, she studiously avoids comparing the U.S. and China or identifying more with one than the other, in keeping with something she told ESPN when she was 16: “When I’m in the U.S., I’m American, but when I’m in China, I’m Chinese.” In the lead-up to the games, she’s resolutely avoided controversial subjects, instead emphasizing the need for more skiing idols for Chinese kids, especially young girls.
For Gu and the Xi government, this approach seems to be paying off. With Gu at the forefront of China’s marketing blitz, ski bookings are surging. “Eileen’s value is through the roof,” says Bob Dorfman, a sports-marketing analyst and creative director at Pinnacle Advertising in San Francisco. “She is the epitome of the new multinational superstar athlete: champion in her sport, brilliant mind, model looks, charismatic, role model to both Chinese and American women, and still just a teen, with unlimited potential.” That is, of course, if she delivers at the Olympics. Like any big-air skier, she’s got a lot of sky to reach for—but it’s also a long way down.
In an essay she once wrote, Gu recalled that at age 7 she had to pick between ski racing, which she said was popular with the girls, and the kind of trick-based skiing done on halfpipes and in terrain parks, which was dominated by boys. She wanted the one where she could flip, fly, and show other girls that nothing was off-limits. Gu’s mom, who also declined to comment for this story, likes to joke that she created a pro skier by accident, because she thought freestyle lessons would be safer than ski racing. She’s now acting as her daughter’s de facto public-relations handler—media decisions go through her.
Between skiing, soccer, ballet, and piano lessons, Gu attended a $40,000-a-year all-girls private K-8 school, then a private high school in San Francisco, where she excelled at distance running. By that time, she’d also begun missing class to compete in international ski competitions. She struggled to choose between running and skiing, in part because she believed running could get her into her dream school, Stanford. In a recent video for Red Bull, she said she was glad she picked skiing. “Being a professional runner,” she said, “is really, really hard.”
Winning a halfpipe event in Aspen, Colo., in 2021.
Photographer: Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images
Starting on Feb. 7, Gu will vie for gold in her three freestyle skiing events, all new to the games in the past decade. The strongest competitors are those who can manage feats such as spinning four full rotations in the air and stomping the landing, even when icy snow has skis chattering or clouds make it hard to determine, midflip, whether sky is snow or the other way around.
Gu’s events are the children of extreme-sports branding, and it shows. When Gu competes, camerapeople are watching from all positions: skiing alongside her, poised at the lip of the halfpipe, or crouched under the ski jump’s knuckle, following her arc across the sky. Some purists gripe about her events, which are closer in spirit to snowboarding than the tight turns and red-and-blue gates of the old-school events. This newer, more image-conscious style doesn’t come with comparable prize purses, but its participants have proven capable of capturing mainstream attention (as Shaun White did in snowboarding) and the sponsorship dollars that come with it.
Canadians and Americans have traditionally dominated freestyle skiing, but since Gu started competing for China, she’s won seven gold medals at international competitions, including at the World Championships and her rookie X Games. In China she has the chance to be the biggest name in her sport.
Riding a rail during a Jan. 9 slopestyle competition in California.
Photographer: Christian Pondella/Red Bull
Over the past few years, Gu has built her reputation as a dominant freestyle skier, becoming the first woman to land a double cork 1440 in competition. (You’ll have to watch the video to believe it.) When she announced she’d compete for China, her Instagram and Weibo accounts flooded with heart emojis.
Alongside the love, though, she got a sizable helping of social media hate. Some commenters called Gu ignorant and said she’d be a puppet of the Chinese Communist Party. They said she was choosing to support genocide in exchange for fat checks from brand sponsorships. “Your mother should have known better,” one wrote.
Athletes have been flexible with their allegiances for the sake of Olympic competitions since the games began in Ancient Greece, according to Joost Jansen, a professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam who’s written about the subject. Gu’s not even the only U.S. native on the Chinese team: Figure skaters Beverly Zhu and Ashley Lin did much as she did. Gu’s high odds of winning, however, have made her the face of China’s efforts at the games. In October, Beijing’s Olympic organizing committee released a five-minute promotional video featuring her skating, skiing, and running along the Great Wall holding the Olympic torch. It took three months to shoot and co-stars one of China’s hottest young actors.
Based on the videos released about Gu in the past few months, it appears as though a film crew has been shooting most of her life since early 2020. A 45-minute Chinese-language documentary made for Youku, a video site, follows her through competitions, downtime at home, her 17th birthday party, and visits to the glacial Mount Hood in Oregon, where the best youth skiers in the U.S. can train well into the summer. The in-house media team at Red Bull has also started releasing a similarly encompassing series of web videos called Everyday Eileen. Whatever Gu is doing, she’s usually wearing a red-and-white Red Bull visor or baseball cap over her long, dyed-blonde hair. When she’s wearing her ski helmet, she often untucks two locks of hair on either side, so they’ll fly in the wind behind her.
All of these breezy video features stick to an anodyne formula. Gu’s piano playing sometimes serves as a background track, and multiple videos include some B-roll footage of her and her grandma making dumplings in their home kitchen in San Francisco, rolling out pillows of dough and pinching the edges closed. The videos can’t help but suggest a subtle Truman Show vibe. In one, after Gu bruises her hip while practicing flips with roller skates, a wood ramp, and a foam pit, she tells the camera crew she has to keep moving on with her day because she has three more things to film that afternoon. Another time, she shows how she’s learned to slap her cheeks before an interview for an Instagram Live video, to simulate the effects of blush on a few seconds’ notice.
Modeling for Louis Vuitton.
Courtesy: Louis Vuitton
Brands, especially those with large markets in China, have been eager to capitalize on Gu’s appeal. She’s modeled for Louis Vuitton, Tiffany & Co., and Estée Lauder, attended last year’s Met Gala in New York City, and been offered a ticket to Paris Fashion Week. Last summer, after Victoria’s Secret ditched its famously Barbie-like Angels models, Gu was one of seven celebrity women, also including soccer star Megan Rapinoe and actress Priyanka Chopra Jonas, who became the beleaguered retailer’s new, more diverse set of faces.
Gu insists that away from the camera she’s an everyday teen, even if she is making the point in a documentary about how she’s going to change the world of skiing. After finishing high school in three years, she got into Stanford. Her excited screams are captured in a video of the moment when she learned she’d been admitted. She’s deferring her freshman year until this fall, after the Olympics.
Attending the Met Gala in September.
Photographer: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic/Getty Images
Besides Red Bull, Gu’s sponsors include Oakley and Faction Skis, an equipment maker. She’s been tight-lipped about the dollar values of the deals, but those sponsors, and her campaigns with Louis Vuitton and the like, appear prominently on her Instagram profile, which has roughly 215,000 followers, and on TikTok, where a recent post was viewed more than 4.4 million times. Still, accessibility remains a key part of her image. “I like to go running or hang out with my friends, build pillow forts, watch movies,” she says in one of the Red Bull episodes. “That side of me sometimes gets lost. Which, I mean, is understandable. But I do like to remind people that that Eileen does exist.”
If Gu wins a gold medal in Beijing, it could be worth $10 million in new sponsorship deals, according to Dorfman, the sports-marketing analyst. But Olympic success could also bring more pressure to take stances on politically sensitive topics. If the games highlight the Uyghurs’ plight and the silencing of Peng Shuai and other dissenters, as activists hope, Gu could be in a tough spot. U.S. companies have already come under fire for taking part. In July, Congress summoned executives from Coca-Cola, Airbnb, Procter & Gamble, Intel, and Visa to explain why they’re sponsoring the Beijing Games. This past month, as human-rights activists protested outside Olympic broadcaster NBC’s headquarters in New York, congressional Republicans demanded that some of these companies detail their connections to the Chinese Communist Party, while Democrats called for an early release of a United Nations report on human rights in Xinjiang, where China’s Uyghur population is concentrated. Acting tough on China is one of the few issues that still enjoys broad bipartisan support in Washington.
Victor Cha, a professor at Georgetown University and author of Beyond the Final Score: The Politics of Sport in Asia, says one reason Xi’s government bid for the Winter Olympics was to find someone like Gu. She might face a backlash in China from some people who see her as an American interloper, says Cha, but the value of an apostate can be high. “It may even show how much more globalized China is,” he says, to embrace a national hero born and raised in a different nation.
Whether or not Gu is helping Xi’s international aims, much of China is still just starting to get used to the idea of winter sports. At the country’s ski resorts, skiers and snowboarders are still so used to tumbles that they often sport large, cushy stuffed animals on their knees and across their butts to protect their bones. The standard is a big fluffy turtle. But with a new hero to cheer on, Chinese skiers could soon be coming out of their shells. “Somebody that looks like you,” Cha says, “goes a long way.” —With John Liu
