American-born Chinese star Eileen Gu has a big air about her, and the gold medal to match

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This article was published 07/02/2022 (1334 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BEIJING—The snow was fake, because all the snow at these Olympics is fake, alchemized by cannons and chemistry, but the physics and stakes were real. Big air is a simple thing made complicated: Go off this jump on skis or a board and do the coolest thing you can. Try not to get killed. It’s a sport for the children of either permissive parents, or distracted ones.

And in the final, on a bright blue-skied Beijing morning in the shadow of decommissioned cooling towers, we saw a future of sport: Eileen Gu, the 18-year-old American-born phenom who represents China. She was under immense pressure here. Imagine.

After two runs Gu sat third, one spot ahead of Canada’s Megan Oldham, who had been first in qualifying, partly because Gu had wobbled under pressure and France’s Tess Ledeux wasn’t at her best. But Gu put the pressure on from her first jump in the final: a double cork 1440, four full rotations, and the most difficult trick of the competition to that point for a 93.75. There had only been two 90s in qualifying Monday; Oldham had the highest, a 91.25. Your best two of the three runs determines who wins.

Ledeux upped the degree of difficulty to a 1620, four-and-a-half full rotations, for a 94.50; she is the only woman who has completed that trick, and it’s more or less the hardest thing you can land. She followed with a 93, and was out front. Gu and Switzerland’s Mathilde Gremaud each had one jump to try to surmount Ledeux: one perhaps had more riding on it than the other.

Gu landed a 1620 on her final run — 94.50 flashed on the scoreboard, the biggest jump of the day under the most pressure. Ledeux needed a 94 to win gold: she dropped a 1440 and her landing was a little wobbly, and she couldn’t do it. The snow was fake. Eileen Gu, under almost unfathomable pressure, was the real thing.

Oldham, 21, finished fourth.

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It was the most strangely perfect backdrop of these Games. The towers in the background were from the decommissioned steel plant in this old industrial park on the western edge of Beijing; the venue is supposed to be permanent, and can therefore stand as a dystopian vision of a winter sports future forever, or until someone forgets to pay the maintenance bill. It’s going to be harder to find real snow on white mountains, as we tip into our climate change future. Plenty of future Winter Olympics may be contested in parking lots.

That wasn’t the only vision of the dynamics of where sports could go. This was always going to be the Gu show: When the San Francisco-born athlete-model decided to compete for her mother’s native China, she almost immediately became an Instagram-friendly face of these Games, and that comes with complications. Gu is preternaturally confident, but assiduously sidesteps any questions that might offend China, whose tolerance for even the mildest dissent is near zero.

Gu can surely dominate the biggest non-U.S. market in the world, as long as she lands the jumps and doesn’t make a wrong step. The IOC has eagerly repeated China’s claim that more than 300 million Chinese participate in winter sports and, even if that is a blatant exaggeration, the Chinese market is not a new idea. IOC president Thomas Bach probably wasn’t in attendance to watch a French freestyle skier.

Gu hasn’t fully explained the reasons for the switch except to say she is passionate about inspiring millions of Chinese children, in the country of her mother’s birth, and calls representing China at a Chinese Olympics a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Beyond the geopolitics, it brings to mind the old Jay-Z line: “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.”

Oldham, meanwhile, should be proud. The kid from Parry Sound, Ont. has had some X Games success, and fourth was nothing to be ashamed of. She just wasn’t quite at the highest level here; there were bigger jumps happening, on grander scales, on this sunny Beijing morning. Gu found her coronation and she was the future, bright and present in the decommissioned steel plant, in the shadow of the cooling towers. Parking lot gold, after all, is still gold.