BEIJING — Eileen Gu stood on two skis at the top of a 200-foot high jump built in the middle of a city where, even at 18 years of age, her image is already ubiquitous. She mimicked the movements of the trick she was about to employ, paused for one last deep breath and started gathering speed toward the ramp that would launch Gu toward her destiny.
In this sport of big air, there is rarely much that falls in between horrifying crashes and feats of genius. To win the gold medal, Gu was going to have to do something she’d never pulled off anywhere except in her imagination. When she landed safely at the bottom of the hill, having successfully executed a double cork 1620 – a 4 ½-rotation trick with two off-axis flips that represents the furthest boundary any female freestyle skier has ever pushed – Gu dropped to her knees in disbelief.
She had done the hardest thing she could possibly do at the only moment she could do it to win the gold medal. In a better world than the one we’re living in, it would have transcended everything about her life, the choices she’s made and the country she now represents on the Olympic stage.
But we don’t live in that world. And so Gu – who was born in the United States, lives in San Francisco and will attend college at Stanford this fall – now enters a new reality where millions of her countrymen and women who did not care about her citizenship on Monday will wake up Tuesday asking why she competes for the country where her mother was born and not her own.
They will scrutinize her words, call her a traitor, lob racist insults, tell her to stay in China and root for her to fail. She will almost certainly be culture war fodder on Fox News for days, but she will not find safe harbor on either the political left or right. The consequences of the choice she made in 2019, which nobody outside this niche sport would have known or cared about, will be evident in ways that even a young woman as intelligent and self-aware as Gu may not fully understand.
EXCLUSIVE OLYMPIC UPDATES:Sign up for texts to get the latest news and behind-the-scenes coverage from Beijing
OLYMPICS NEWSLETTER:The best Olympic stories straight to your inbox
OLYMPICS MEDAL COUNT:Track the hardware in Beijing by country
“I definitely feel as though I’m just as American as I am Chinese,” she said. “I’m American when I’m in the U.S. and Chinese when I’m in China and I’ve been outspoken about my gratitude to both the U.S. and China for making me the person that I am.
“I don’t feel as though I’m taking advantage of one or the other because both have been incredibly supportive of me and continue to be supportive of me because they understand that my mission is to use sport as a force for unity, to use it as a form to foster interconnection between countries and not use it as a divisive force. So that benefits everyone, and if you disagree with that, I feel like it’s someone else’s problem.”
There are certainly hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of kids in America who feel the same way about their cultural identity because they grew up with an immigrant parent or grandparent or spoke a language other than English at home.
But the question asked was not about her identity. It was about her citizenship, a topic that is now at the thrust of her story during an Olympics where it is impossible to glide over the political issues between the U.S. and China as easily as Gu thrusts herself into the air and performs body-bending feats.
No limit to her potential
When the decision was made to compete for China in 2019, the context of the relationship between the two countries was different. The crackdown on freedom in Hong Kong was just beginning. The extent of the human rights abuses in the Xinjiang region and detainment of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities wasn’t well-known to the world. Peng Shuai was a relatively low-profile tennis player.
And Gu was just another burgeoning American business looking for opportunity in a wide-open market.
In her native country, Gu was going to be a star for a week or two if she won a gold medal. With her model looks, her fluency in Mandarin and her ability to compel millions of Chinese viewers to care about the Olympics, there was no limit to the magnitude of what she could become or, perhaps more to the point, what products she could sell.
And she is everywhere here, appearing in ad campaigns for a gamut of companies ranging from the Bank of China to Louis Vuitton. She is also rehearsed and smart, a marketing machine who has been programmed to frame her choice as an opportunity to inspire winter sports passion in China while saying nothing that would offend the Chinese Communist Party.
Using her voice to create 'positive change'
It’s why her intentionally vague answers on the citizenship question are, in fact, so fascinating. Chinese law does not allow dual citizenship, and yet her refusal to say she’s given up her American passport would suggest that perhaps she’s been allowed to play by different rules.
But when your birth country watches you win a gold medal at an Olympics that is being held under a diplomatic boycott by the U.S. government, the aspirational pablum about bridging cultural divides does not land quite as smoothly as she does after a double cork.
“I’m an 18-year-old girl out here living my best life,” she said. “Like, I’m having a great time. It doesn’t matter if other people are happy or not because I feel as though I’m doing my best enjoying the entire process and 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.”
She continued, “I know I have a good heart and I know 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. So if other people don’t really believe that’s where I’m coming from, that just reflects they don’t 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 never going to experience the kind of joy and gratitude and just love that I have the great fortune to experience on a daily basis. If people don’t believe me and if people don’t like me, that’s their loss. They’re never going to win the Olympics.”
Besides the last line, which doesn’t exactly make the case for empathy, you can see where she’s coming from. The world has bigger problems than which flag an 18-year-old skier you never heard of until this week competes under.
But Gu is also going to have to learn to live in a new world of cynicism. When she says she’s careful about the brands she chooses to work with, that she wants them to “inspire positive social change” and “care about women in society” while aligning with China, it’s impossible to avoid the hypocrisy. When Gu sidesteps a question about Peng Shuai’s attendance Tuesday by saying she’s “grateful that she’s happy and healthy and out here doing her thing again,” it’s just more propaganda.
Gu is an unmistakably special athlete, one whose performance Tuesday validated her immense talent. She’s also just 18 and does not deserve the bitterness and hate that’s about to come her way.
Up until now, Gu has been able to play the Pollyanna in a political proxy fight between the country where she lives and the country she represents on the world sporting stage. As her profile grows at home, that balance is going to inevitably be harder to maintain without looking like a rank opportunist. The double cork 1620 she pulled off Tuesday may seem easy by comparison.
Source link
