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When sports fans hear Eileen Gu’s name over the next 12 months – and they hear her a lot – it won’t be by accident.
Hard work, laser-focused planning, an alien wealth of talent and excellent timing could turn this 17-year-old freeskier, originally from San Francisco but whose mother is from China, into the most recognizable daredevil in the world. ‘action. world of sport.
She broke through this weekend to become a two-time Winter X-Games champion – once in halfpipe on Friday, then again in slopestyle on Saturday. The victories put Gu squarely on the short list of gold medal contenders at the Beijing Olympics next February.
The victories could be nothing less than transformative for snow sports in China. Although Gu grew up in the United States and skied most of her childhood on the United States team, she will compete for the home team at the Beijing Olympics. It was a tough decision made less due to the untapped public in this country. When China offered to host the Olympics, it set a goal of putting 300 million people on snow in a country of 1.4 billion people.
Gu, who is fluent in Mandarin and makes annual trips to China with her mother, Yan, thinks she could do her fair share to bring young girls with her.
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“Some people retire with 10 gold medals and then they’re 30 and don’t know what to do,” she said. “But I want to be able to get these medals and feel like I’ve changed someone’s life, changed sport or brought sport to a country where it didn’t exist before.”
It’s a bold speech for a teenage girl who has been doing this at the highest level for just over two years and making her X Games debut this year. She also won big air bronze on Friday night and will leave Aspen as the first woman to win three X Games medals as a rookie.
But for most of her 17 years, Gu has been thinking big – and succeeding in almost everything she’s tried.
His parallel work is modeling. Become a regular at fashion week in Paris and New York, she has browsed the pages of Chinese versions of Vogue and Harper’s and Elle, and has more prestigious shoots scheduled for later this year with American magazines. “I love the sound of the camera shutters,” she says.
She’s an accomplished pianist – you can find part of it on YouTube – an avid runner who headlined her high school team’s second-place finish at the state championships. She graduated from the rigorous high school at the University of San Francisco in three years and is enrolled at Stanford, where she will begin in 2022.
“And,” she said, “I like going out with my friends, because I’m a teenager, and that’s important too.”
She says she was able to bring a semblance of normalcy to her very successful childhood because she grew up in the ski-free Mecca of San Francisco. She was invited to parties over the weekend and would apologize to her friends, but she was going skiing.
“They’d be pretty much, ‘Skiing, OK, whatever,’” she said. “I think a lot of them still think I’m a skier, not freestyle.”
It was mother Yan’s horror of seeing her then 8-year-old daughter hitting the slopes on one of their frequent trips to Northstar Ski Resort that urged her to find something different, and perhaps less dangerous, for Eileen.
Eileen says her mom didn’t really know what “freestyle” was, or that high-flying flips over halfpipe and slopestyle kickers could be just as treacherous as hitting the ski slopes. But Yan has recruited Eileen and has thus started a journey that feels destined to make a career milestone in the mountains above Beijing next February.
It was in these early days that Gu faced what any talented girl encounters upon entering a boy-dominated realm.
“It wasn’t until I was 14 that I had ski friends who were at my level,” she says. “So, I was constantly thinking, ‘Do I have to prove myself? I’m the only girl here. Do I have to do a bigger thing? Do I have to make myself look better so that people don’t laugh at women’s skiing? ‘”
Regarding another thorny issue, Gu says she’s not naive about the hatred she receives on her burgeoning social media accounts for choosing China over the United States for her ski career. She is well aware of the volume that detractors might order as her story draws closer to the Olympic flame.
“‘Difficult’ is not the right word, but it weighed very heavily,” said agent Tom Yaps, who said the United States team quickly recognized Gu as someone with enormous talent who would really need to be represented. “At the end of the day, she really feels that she can make an impact in the lives of these young women. She looked around and said, ‘There are so many brilliant models in America already,’ and she felt her voice could really make an impact there. “
Gu, who is as savvy as athletes twice her age, seems to understand the weight of what she does. She was the voiceover for an Adidas ad on women’s empowerment, reading a seventh-grade essay she wrote on U.S. Title IX law, which was written to protect women. discrimination in college sports. Recently, Yaps said, Gu received a request to record a video for an upcoming diplomatic summit on improving Sino-US relations.
“Things like that are literally the reason she does this,” Yaps said.
Gu tells the story of her sixth grade art project, when she made a handbag out of duct tape with the slogan “Celebrate Sarah” engraved on the side – as a clamor to the late Sarah Burke, who opened the way for women in freestyle skiing and played a central role in the entry of the event on the Olympic program.
“I was terrible at art,” Gu said. “But I gave a little history lesson. I was like a 12-year-old girl competing with me over a woman in a sport that no one played. But in the end people said it was really inspiring. Got an ‘A’ on the wallet. “
The stakes are higher now.
When asked what she wanted her post to be as she embarks on a whirlwind year that is expected to land her on a mountain in her other home country, Gu said she would like to see more. of girls in China reflect on opportunities they never knew existed. . She would love to see a lot more people like her on the mountain – maybe one or two of them someday pushing her for a gold medal.
“Change is from the bottom up,” she says. “We were all little girls surrounded for the first time by people we were afraid of at first. But I just want to see more people there.”
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