Known as China’s ‘Snow Princess’, Eileen Gu clearly has ice in her veins. Under huge pressure to win her first Olympic gold medal at her home Games, the 18-year-old attempted and landed a 1620 – four and a half rotations – for the first time in her competitive career.
That Gu needed to debut the trick in the Olympic big air final, where she lay in the bronze medal position after two runs, was a measure of the expectations of the US-born teenager in China.
And her risk-taking paid off in style as she scored 94.50 in her third jump to beat France’s Tess Ledeux – the only other woman to have achieved a 1620 in an event, including in the first run of Tuesday’s final.
“I felt pretty confident [to try the 1620],” Gu told a packed media conference as she became China’s youngest Winter Olympic gold medallist.
“I played piano for nine years so I have a sense of rhythm and all my tricks are about rhythm and change of tempo, and I visualise them.
“My motto is to break your own barriers. That is my character.”
Gu beat France’s Ledeux by 0.75 points to win gold for China
The crowd at Shougang Park – a former steelworks in western Beijing – included Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai, who was accompanied by International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach.
Her well-being has been a matter of global concern since she alleged on social media in November that former Chinese vice premier, Zhang Gaoli, had sexually assaulted her.
Gu speaks confidently and fluently in both English and Mandarin, and answered all questions put to her – albeit some of them very diplomatically.
She said she was “happy Peng was here today” to watch her compete and was grateful she was “happy and healthy and out here doing her thing”.
Then it was on to her nationality.
In 2019, Gu switched from representing the United States, where she was born in 2003 to a Chinese mother and an American father, to China.
The switch preceded China’s first staging of the Winter Olym, a Games made controversial by China’s alleged human rights abuses, with the US one of several countries to announce a diplomatic boycott of Beijing 2022 in consequence, as well as by the geopolitical tensions between the two global powerhouses.
Gu would not answer directly whether she was still a US citizen but said she felt American when she was in the United States and Chinese when she was in China.
In September, she will be back in California, an undergraduate at Stanford University. In China she is a household name. Her face adorns billboards and magazine covers and she has nearly two million followers on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, plus multiple sponsors and brand deals and a parallel career as a fashion model.
And her standing in the host nation looks like it will only increase. With two more events to come in Beijing – slopestyle and halfpipe – she could feasibly come away with three gold medals in her home Games.
“I’m just an 18-year-old, living her best life,” she said.
And it’s an extraordinary one at that.
