Risk-taking teen a breakthrough star

ASPEN, Colo. — When sports fans hear the name Eileen Gu over the next 12 months — and they will hear it a lot — it will not be by accident.

Hard work, laser-focused planning, an unworldly wealth of talent and a splendid bit of timing could turn this 17-yearold freeskier, 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 twotime Winter X-Games champion — once on the halfpipe Friday, then again on the slopestyle course Saturday. Those victories place Gu squarely on the short list of gold-medal contenders at the Beijing Olympics next February.

Wins there could be nothing less than transformative for snow sports in China. Though Gu grew up in the United States and skied 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 made less so because of the untapped audience in that country. When China was bidding to host the Olympics, it set a target of putting 300 million people on snow in a country of 1.4 billion.

Gu, who speaks fluent Mandarin and makes yearly trips to China with her mom, Yan, figures she could do her fair share to bring some young girls along for the ride.

“Some people retire with 10 gold medals and then, they’re 30 years old and don’t know what to do,” she said. “But I want to be able to have those medals and to be able to feel like I’ve changed someone’s life or changed the sport or introduced the sport to a country where it wasn’t before.”

It’s audacious talk for a teenager who has been doing this at the highest level for just a bit more than two years, and who was making her X Games debut this year. She also won bronze in big air on Friday night and will leave Aspen as the first woman to earn three X Games medals as a rookie.

But for most of her 17 years, Gu has been thinking big — and succeeding at almost everything she’s tried.

Her side job is modeling. Becoming a regular at fashion weeks in Paris and New York, she’s been all over the pages of Chinese versions of Vogue and Harper’s and Elle, and has more high-profile shoots set for later this year with American magazines. “I love the sound of camera shutters,” she said.

She’s an accomplished piano player and an avid runner who headlined her high school team’s second-place finish at state championships. She graduated from the rigorous San Francisco University High School in three years and is enrolled at Stanford, where she’ll start in 2022.

“And,” she says, “I like to hang out with my friends, because I’m a teenager, and that’s important, too.”

She says she was able to bring some semblance of normalcy to her high-achieving childhood because she grew up in the non-ski-mecca of San Francisco. She’d get invited to parties over the weekend and tell friends sorry, but she was going skiing.

“They would pretty much be, ‘Skiing, 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 at seeing her daughter, then 8, straight-lining down the slopes during one of their frequent trips to the Northstar ski resort that urged her to find something different, and maybe less dangerous, for Eileen.

Eileen says her mom didn’t really know what “freestyle” was, or that the high-flying flips above the halfpipe and slopestyle kickers could be every bit as treacherous as tearing straight down the ski slopes. But Yan signed Eileen up, and thus began a journey that feels destined to make a career-defining stop in the mountains above Beijing next February.

Asked what she wanted her message to be as she embarks on a whirlwind year that figures to land her on a mountain in her other home country, Gu said she’d love to see more girls in China think about opportunities they didn’t know existed. She’d like to see a lot more people like her on the mountain — maybe one or two of them pushing her for a gold medal someday.

“Change is made from the bottom up,” she said. “All of us were little girls surrounded for the first time by people we were scared of in the beginning. But I just want to see more people out there.”