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by John Rama
SAAS-FEE, Switzerland — Day after day in October, race after race, on a glacier above the city, freestyle skier Eileen Gu spent hours perfecting her tricks in the half-tube and then on the giant ramps of the hillside slope next door. The Winter Olympics, where Gu will be one of the most important stars, whether he wins or loses, is still a few months away.
Fly, flip, turn, land; fly, flip, turn, land. Again and again, it forges confidence and records the aerial corkscrew movements in muscle memory. Then he went straight to the T-bar which took him back to the top. The silent monotony was repeated for weeks in the fall.
Gu, an 18-year-old born and raised in San Francisco in 2019 to compete for China, her mother’s home country. She is well known there as Gu Ailing, a dominant skier and a budding supermodel.
She flew into the Olympics with realistic hopes of winning 3 gold medals. But its most complicated twist could be to fly over the geopolitical fray of those Olympics: diplomatic boycotts, accusations of human rights violations and a debate about the long-term of the global one. – and descends safely, straddling the developing gap of two superpowers.
“I’m creating traffic jams in a 22-foot U-shaped icy snow structure,” Gu said. “It’s political. It pushes human barriers and connects people.
In Switzerland, each and every figure, each and every race, was intensely watched through a middle-aged woman on skis: Gu’s mother, Yan, who emigrated from China about 30 years ago and raised Eileen as a single mother. Yan Gu, a former ski instructor at a hotel near Lake Tahoe, the daughter of an official (“the top decorated electrical engineer of China’s Ministry of Housing and Urban and Rural Development,” says her 2014 obituary), is never far from her daughter, wherever the world takes them.
Looking from the most sensible of the crescent, Yan Gu twisted his body to the rhythm of his daughter’s stunts, muttered directions and clenched his fists, and then ran after Eileen down the mountain and towards the most sensible.
The only interruption in the educational program came from fashion events and filming. Gu is an IMG model. From Switzerland, a personal plane took her to Paris and disembarked her in the front row for a Louis Vuitton occasion at the Louvre. This happened a few weeks after Gu left education in Austria to participate in New York Fashion Week and the Met Gala.
Its main sponsors are only the ski brands and Red Bull, but also Tiffany
On his birthday in September, a day he spent on a yacht in Dubai, Gu announced partnerships with Cadillac in China and Luckin Coffee, a competitor to Starbucks. They have made headlines in the Chinese media, which follow their movements very closely.
In her own words, freeskier Eileen Gu describes how to find the balance between confidence in her talents and the thrill of uncertainty.
Are you a skier or model?A clumsy teenager or a world icon?A Stanford e-book student (accepted, postponed her admission for a year) or a social media influencer?Is it Chinese or American?
Can the only conversations about your position be about ski slopes and slopes, politics and human rights?
Your quest — pleasing the Chinese government and others as it trades in the United States and around the world — can be more complicated than anything you do in the snow of Beijing.
“It’s a complicated scenario for her, and it’s a very sensitive scenario for her,” said Zhao Ma, a professor of chinese history and culture fashion at the University of Washington in St. Louis. ” There’s not much room for error for her. “
Eileen Gu was born in San Francisco in 2003. Chinese media refer to her as the daughter of a Chinese mother and an American father, mentioning infrequently that he graduated from Harvard. But there is no public indication of Gu’s father. She declined to comment when asked if she knew anything about him.
Yan Gu studied chemistry and biochemistry at Peking University in the 1980s and then came to the United States to earn a master’s degree in biochemistry and molecular biology at Auburn. He continued his studies at Rockefeller University in New York, then headed west to the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
He has spent years as a venture capitalist with interests in China. Since 2013, her LinkedIn profile says, she owns her own company as a “private investor and investment expert in China. “
Eileen grew up in San Francisco’s Sea Cliff neighborhood, with a room overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, in a house she stores with her mother and grandmother.
Gu is fluent in Mandarin Chinese and has visited family and friends in Beijing most summers of his life. His grandmother Feng Guozhen co-stars in Gu’s social media posts, including in short documentaries aimed at Chinese audiences.
Her story would seem to be a multigenerational and multicultural story of 3 strong women, however, the circle of relatives is not interested in sharing it with a Western audience without controlling how it is told.
Yan Gu, 58, said he would only communicate publicly about his daughter if the New York Times avoided political questions about China and allowed him to review the article before it was published. The Times rejected the situations and there was no official interview. .
Yan Gu and Eileen’s sports agent Tom Yaps admitted that they feared how the story would be interpreted in China.
There’s a lot to lose by endangering a groomed character. This is especially true in China, where nationalism allows citizens to tap into any smell of dissent or disloyalty.
The recent case of Chloé Zhao, who won the Oscar for directing the film “Nomadland,” illustrates this point. Zhao faced a backlash in China when old quotes emerged from her and some Chinese considered them unpatriotic. The censors closed the menciones. de Zhao and his work. “Nomadland” and Zhao’s next film, the big-budget superhero film “The Eternals,” were released in China.
This is the kind of advertising backlash feared by those doing business in China, adding in the sports world. The United States, enforcing diplomatic boycotts in protest.
Gu hopes to maintain an impartial duality. ” When I’m in america, I’m American, but when I’m in China, I’m Chinese,” she said.
After winning the prestigious Dew Tour crescent festival in Copper Mountain, Colorado, in December, Gu agreed to a brief interview on the slopes (she is one of 40 other Olympic hopefuls who had already spoken to the Times for a series of ” scary-themed videos”).
She is kind, self-critical and considerate: all the features that make her popular, whether among enthusiasts and other competitors, adding former American teammates. But when the issue of China was addressed, before any mention of Hong Kong, the Uighurs, the disappearance of tennis player Peng Shuai and the withdrawal of the China Women’s Tennis Association, he looked at Yaps, who tried to end the interview.
“I’m going to pass,” said Gu. No want to divide. I think everything I do is about inclusion. And it’s about making everyone feel as connected as possible.
The question is whether she can take this stance, being a public figure without public opinion, representing rival countries that have a decentralized relationship.
“He will have to get involved in how he handles Chinese media scrutiny: how he comments on American policy, how he comments on U. S. -China relations,” Ma said. “The other challenge is the repercussions on the American side. I don’t think he’s in a position to give up everything he has in the United States.
Gu declined to comment when asked about her prestige as a citizen. China allows dual citizenship, but there is no official document stating that you have renounced your U. S. citizenship.
Gu was 3 years old when her mother first took her skiing. As they lived several hours from the slopes around Lake Tahoe, the game was little more than a weekend activity. Yan Gu spent a few years skiing part-time. instructor at Northstar and bought a condo nearby. The number of days Eileen spent in the snow each season can be counted in dozens, not hundreds, a path to Olympic fame.
He had many other interests. She is a talented pianist and a perfect student. Maybe her favorite game as a woman running; he dreamed of making his way on the Stanford cross country team.
He attended the University of San Francisco High School, a personal school with an annual tuition payment of $54,130 this year. Chinese media report that Gu received 1,580 (out of 1,600) from his SAT. In December 2020, he posted an Instagram video of the moment. he learned that he had entered Stanford. (“It’s the only dream I’ve had for longer than my dream of going to the Olympics,” he said. )He postponed admission, with plans to begin this fall.
A professional skiing career only began to take shape once he became a teenager. A key moment came here when a cross-country ski festival coincided with a ski event abroad. Gu chose the ski event. It has since been an emerging force.
Dave Euler, the American head coach of competitive freeskiing, spent time with Gu for the first time at the World Junior Ski Championships in New Zealand in 2018. He saw that she would do the hardest exercises after the competitions, striving to solve each and every one of them. small stumbling block of his breed.
“It wasn’t his talent, but his ambition and his drive to improve,” Euler said. “It was like, ‘Okay, Eileen has something. ‘”
She started primarily as a track-style skier, where athletes navigate a course of rails and stumbles before embarking on a series of jumps. She was a rail enthusiast at a young age and temporarily evolved more and more comfortable in the air, taking this skill to the fullest. half a tube.
In January 2019, at just 15 years old and representing the United States, Gu won a World Cup event in Italy at Slopestyle. Coaches knew he could be a star at the 2022 Beijing Olympics.
But it’s already deeply rooted in China. Gu and her mother spent a portion of every summer in Beijing. Yan Gu told Chinese media in 2015 that Eileen sponsored through Beijing Nanshan Ski Resort (her existing biography with the International Ski Federation mentions her as her hometown). ) and that they were friends of Lu Jian, the resort’s founder and pioneer of China’s nascent ski industry.
At the time, she was nicknamed “the frog princess” in China, a nickname derived from a helmet with the theme of a green frog she wore as a child.
Gu in Beijing in 2015 when the city was selected to host the 2022 Winter Games, a memory that contributed to the start of Gu’s Olympic ambitions. In February 2019, she was in the most sensible place among Chinese athletes posing with Xi Jinping.
Months later, he announced he would compete for China rather than the United States, explaining that he was looking to help expand the sport. American people,” Gu wrote in Chinese on Weibo, a popular social networking site in China.
The news disappointed the American coaches who helped her prepare and saw raw talent, infrequent field and unlimited potential. However, the U. S. Ski Federation(S. )
“We are very grateful to Eileen for thanking U. S. Ski.
When Gu made the decision to compete for China, it was still unclear how dominant he would be in skiing. He then went to the X Games 2021 in Aspen and won two gold medals and one bronze, the most productive functionality ever achieved through the X Games. Rookie. He followed that up with 3 more medals, adding two gold, at the world championships.
This season, he swept every halfpipe festival on the world circuit, won his big air festival and finished for the moment at any slopestyle event.
China has never won more than gold medals at the Winter Olympics; at the Pyeongchang 2018 Games, he won one. Beyond expanding the number of medals, Gu contributes to the country’s ambitions to expand its winter sports market.
At the end of 2021, he had nearly seven times more followers on his private Chinese-language Weibo account (1. 23 million) than on his English-language Instagram page (169,000).
She is the subject of gripping stories in China’s state media. It was the subject of a 24-minute documentary on CCTV, the public broadcasting company, in 2018.
It has sponsorship contracts in China with, among others, Estée Lauder, Mengniu Dairy (promoting a milk logo that targets top academics for college frontal exams), People’s Insurance Company of China, Kohler, Bank of China, China Mobile and China. Unicom.
Gu inspired Chinese enthusiasts with his hits, captivated them with his wisdom of Chinese culture, and made himself enjoy through his strong Beijing accent.
Rumors circulated that he would carry the Olympic torch. He did it in a Chinese promotional short film that would have had a hundred million views in two days. In the end, Gu and a popular Chinese actor ran with the Olympic torch over the Great Wall. .
A few days after Gu returned to Switzerland after the Paris fashion event in October at the Louvre, she was at the glacial education camp on Saas-Fee, perfecting her free ski tricks.
Gu is one of the few skiers or snowboarders who compete at the highest point in halfpipe and slopestyle. (At the Olympics, those who qualify for slopestyle will also compete in big air, a large synthetic jump that was erected in the city of Beijing. . )
On the glacier, Gu stood out. She is tall (5 feet nine inches) and red-haired, in a game where many athletes are small and muscular, looking for more gymnasts than models. He wore a jacket on his hips, some days black, some days red, with a giant dragon on his back. His hair, with a trace of blonde, indifferent to the front of his Red Bull helmet.
Athletically, what basically separates Gu from his competition is his ability to skillfully give 4 other instructions: left or right while escherating forward or backward. Another is that he is relentless in training.
Fly, flip, turn, land; fly, flip, turn, land. Take the T-bar. Repeat.
A few weeks later, in December, Gu won the big halfpipe festival in Colorado. After the awards ceremony, and after photos and hugs with which he won again, Gu was on his way to exercise on the slopestyle track.
He had time to ask some questions. But not everything. Like her mother, she was unwilling to talk about her circle of family roots, cultural ties with her mother and grandmother, this story is popular in China.
“With my grandmother, who is competitive and gives me that winning mentality, and then my mother giving me the ethics of paintings, I think I honor them by doing as productive as possible and putting everything into it,” Gu said.
Soon he skied, a cheerful “Thank you!” following it. She had tricks to practice, some other festival was waiting for her, everything was preparing for the Winter Olympics.
In mid-January, about 3 weeks before the scheduled date for the festival, Gu and his mother arrived in Beijing, singled out through reports in Chinese media. Gu posted photos of her on Weibo, at the airport and in front of a plate of 20 ravioli. .
“Beijing dumpings, I finished them all,” Gu wrote in Chinese.
“Welcome home,” one fan replied. This is your forever home. “
Amy Chang Chien contributed to the report.
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