When sports fans hear the name Eileen Gu over the next 12 months – and they will hear it a lot – it will not happen by accident.
Hard work, laser-focused planning, a world-wide wealth of talent and an amazing timing can turn this 17-year-old freestyle skier, who hails from San Francisco but whose mother is from China, into the most recognizable daredevil in the action. sports world.
She broke through this weekend to become a two-time Winter X-Games champion – once on the half-pipe Friday, then again on the slopestyle track on Saturday. These victories place Gu on the shortlist of medal competitors at the Olympic Games in Beijing next February.
Victories can be nothing short of transformative for snow sports in China. Although Gu grew up in the United States and spent most of her childhood on the U.S. team, she will compete for the home team at the Beijing Olympics. It was a difficult decision that was less taken due to the untapped audience in the country. When China offered to host the Olympics, it set a target of putting 300 million people on snow in a 1.4 billion country.
Gu, who speaks fluent Mandarin and travels to China annually with her mother, Yan, believes she can do her fair share of bringing young girls along.
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“Some people retire with ten gold medals and then they are thirty years old and do not know what to do,” she said. “But I want to be able to have those medals and feel like I changed someone’s life, changed the sport or introduced the sport in a country where it was not before.”
This is an audacious talk for a teenager who has been doing it at the highest level for just over two years, and who made her debut with X Games this year. She also won bronze in the air on Friday night and will win Aspen as the first woman to win three X medals as a rookie.
But for most of her 17 years, Gu thought big – and successfully did almost everything she tried.
Her update is modeling. She was a regular at fashion shows in Paris and New York, and she was all the pages in Chinese versions of Vogue and Harper’s and Elle, and had more sensational recordings for later this year with American magazines. “I like the sound of camera shutters,” she said.
She is a skilled pianist – you can find it on YouTube – an avid runner who finished second in her high school team at the state championships. She graduated from the rigorous San Francisco University High School in three years and is enrolled at Stanford, where she will begin in 2022.
“And,” she says, “I want to hang out with my friends, because I’m a teenager, and that’s important, too.
She says she was able to bring a bit of a semblance of normalcy to her high-achieving childhood because she grew up in the non-ski mecca of San Francisco. She will be invited to parties this weekend and say sorry to friends, but she is going skiing.
“They would be virtually, ‘Ski, OK, whatever,'” she said. “I think a lot of them still think I’m a ski racer, not in freestyle.”
It was Mother Yan’s horror when she saw her daughter, then 8, walking down the slopes during one of their regular trips to the Northstar ski resort, which prompted her to find something different and perhaps less dangerous for Eileen.
Eileen says her mother did not really know what ‘freestyle’ was, or that the high-flying top of the half-pipe and slopestyle kickers could be just as treacherous as tearing right off the ski slopes. But Yan reported to Eileen, thus embarking on a journey destined to make a career-defining stop in the mountains above Beijing next February.
In those early days, Gu was dealing with what a talented girl encounters in an empire dominated by boys.
“I only had my female ski friends at 14 who were my level,” she said. “So, I kept thinking, ‘Should I prove myself? I’m the only girl here. Should I do a bigger trick? Should I make myself look better so people can not laugh at women’s skiing?'”
On another thorny issue, Gu says she is not naive about some of the hatred she receives on her budding social media accounts because she preferred China over the US for her skiing career. She is well aware of how much volume the opponents may have as her story gets closer to the Olympic flame.
“‘Difficult’ is the wrong word, but she weighed everything very heavily,” said her agent, Tom Yaps, who spoke of the American team’s early recognition of Gu as someone with great talent who would need a lot of representation. . “At the end of the day, she really feels like she can make an impact in the lives of these young women. She looks around and says, ‘There are so many brilliant role models in the US,’ and she feels her voice can really make an impact there. “
Gu, who is as smart as two-year-old athletes, seems to understand the weight of what she’s doing. It was she who did the stamping on an adidas ad about women’s empowerment, read from a seventh-grade essay she wrote about America’s title IX law, written to protect women from discrimination in university sports. Recently, Yaps said, Gu received a request to record a video for an upcoming diplomacy summit on improving relations between China and America.
“Things like that are literally the reason she does it,” Yaps said.
Gu tells the story of her sixth-grade art project, when she made a purse with the slogan ‘Celebrate Sarah’ etched on the side – like wood-out to the late Sarah Burke, who skied the track for women in freestyle and was central to place the event on the Olympic program.
“I was terrible at art,” Gu said. “But I gave a little history lesson. I was quite a twelve-year-old man hanging out with a woman in a sport that no one did. But in the end, people said it’s really inspiring. I had a “A ‘on the wallet.”
The interests are now higher.
Asked what she wants her message to be as she begins a stormy year that will land her on a mountain in her other homeland, Gu said she would like to see more girls in China reflect on opportunities they do not know. exist. . She would like to see more people like her on the mountain – maybe push one or two of her sometime for a gold medal.
“Change is being made from the bottom up,” she said. ‘All were little girls who were surrounded for the first time by people we were afraid of in the beginning. But I just want to see more people there. ‘