Eileen Gu, the young ski star at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, is the perfect face of these Games

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/02/2022 (1660 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BEIJING Some people feel written, and moments, too. Eileen Gu stood at the top of a hill and needed the jump of her young famous life and she nailed it and, as she waited for her results, the International Olympic Committee president beamed in the camera shot behind her, clapping away. Gu won gold on a double cork 1620, a jump only one other woman has ever landed, a jump she said she had never tried before, except in her mind. She showed journalists her phone: The lock screen was a gold medal.

“This is exactly what I visualized,” Gu said. “Exactly.”

It was the whole Beijing Olympics in one place. The 18-year-old’s story is well-worn at this point, polished to a glow: born and raised in San Francisco by her Chinese mother, fluent in English and Mandarin, aced the SATs and got into Stanford, plays piano and has dabbled in ballet, and she chose to compete for China as it roars into what it hopes is truly the Chinese century. She feels like the future. Or a future, anyway.

You can’t be a star unless you deliver, and she did, in the first women’s big air freestyle ski competition. Gu spoke with such confidence afterward, such curated precision, that it was almost unnerving. She called her mom before the last jump and overruled her suggestion, and planned to celebrate by playing the piano, writing in her journal and opening a special bag of peppermint bark chocolate. Lots of athletes have media training. Gu makes it look like she has been preparing her whole life, and had a talent to boot.

“I’m just here to to have fun to enjoy the process and show the world what I’m capable of,” she said. “And so, because it’s such a big platform and so many people are watching, I felt as though it’s this amazing opportunity to represent my character.

“And this purpose and this passion that I’ve always talked about, about breaking my own limits and skiing for myself … even if I didn’t land it, I kind of saw it as a win-win situation because if I didn’t land it, I feel as though I would have showed the world, hey, you know, at least she’s willing to try, she’s not afraid to try to break her own boundaries to do something that she’s never done before.”

Gu is for real, and she is a marketing campaign, too. There is no athlete at these Games who exists at the intersection of the world’s geopolitics like Gu, and she exists exactly where the IOC and Beijing want her to be. When she spoke to IOC president Thomas Bach after the race, she told him she admired his opening ceremony speech “about bridging the gap and having sports be something that is something to unite, and make people from all different countries understand each other as a form of communication, as a form of friendship.” She is the perfect face of these Olympics, in more ways than one.

And this is where it darkens, because this is Beijing. Tennis star Peng Shuai was at the Big Air Shougang venue, too, sitting with Bach, her third appearance at an event in three days. The IOC has been abetting China’s coverup of Peng’s accusations of sexual assault against a prominent government and Olympic official, and Peng’s appearances here have the grisly feeling of proof of life. Even L’Equipe, which published an exclusive interview with her, admitted it was propaganda.

Which was a reminder of the path Gu now has to walk. She still dodges the question of surrendering her American citizenship, preferring to position herself as a bridge between the two countries; China does not allow for dual citizenship, so that is a real question when you are trying to be of both worlds. Gu loves saying, “If I can inspire one girl, then that’s enough.” It’s all a nice idea.

But she has a sweet ferocity to her, too, and it almost seems designed to insulate her from both the bad-faith criticism — jingoistic anti-Asian sentiment from the Fox News crowd, for instance — and real questions. She had every right to represent the nation of her mother’s birth, and to choose her path. She has every right to seek her fortune in this world.

“You know, it doesn’t really matter if other people are happy or not because I feel as though I am doing my best,” Gu said. “I am enjoying that entire process, and I’m using my voice to create as much positive change as I can for the voices who will listen to me, in an area that is personal and relevant to myself.

“So I know that I have a good heart and I know that my reasons for making the decisions I do are based on a greater common interest and something that I feel like is for the greater good. And so if other people don’t really believe that that’s where I’m coming from, then that just reflects that they do not have the empathy to empathize with a good heart, perhaps because they don’t share the same kind of morals that I do.

“And, in that sense, I’m not going to waste my time trying to placate people who are one, uneducated, and two, probably are never going to experience the kind of joy and gratitude and love that I have great fortune to experience on a daily basis. So, yeah, if people don’t believe me or if people don’t like me, their loss, they’re never going to win the Olympics.”

That was steel.

Winnipeg Free Press | Newsletter

Head Start

Weekday Mornings

A quick glance at the news for the upcoming day.

Sign up for Head Start

Sign Up

I consent to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies.

I consent to CASL agreement.

But she is China’s most famous sports figure, or will be soon, and that also comes at a cost. Gu was asked about Peng and her presence and the allegations, and Gu skilfully repackaged it with an answer to a question that was not asked. Media training 101.

“I’m really happy to hear that she was here today,” Gu said. “It’s a big honour when athletes of different sports, especially of more widely known sports like tennis, come and pay attention to the smaller niche sports like free skiing. I think it gives us an amazing platform to hopefully spread our small sport to the rest of the world and have everybody else have an opportunity to experience the sport as well. I’m really grateful that she’s, yeah, happy and healthy, and out here and doing her thing again.”

Doing her thing again. Maybe an 18-year-old shouldn’t have to answer questions that heavy, even if they have clearly been training to both twist in the air and answer questions for years before this. But if you are the face of Chinese sports, the questions will come. Sports are so often used to cleanse the sins of a nation, no matter where you go. But Beijing’s need for total control stands out.

These were the Beijing Olympics all in one place. After the event Bach mentioned, almost offhandedly, that Peng will now leave the closed loop and quarantine somewhere, and it almost felt like an official handover: Peng has been seen, the message delivered, but she must go now, though god knows where. A new star has been born.

Bruce Arthur is a Toronto-based columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @bruce_arthur