It’s official: S.F.’s Gu is global star
Halfpipe gold caps breakout Games for China athlete
ZHANGJIAKOU, China — Eileen Gu turned the Beijing Olympics into her own personal playground.
In the city. In the mountains. Spinning, flipping and flying above three different venues.
The San Francisco-born Gu came into the Games hoping to win three gold medals in freestyle skiing while representing China, where her mother was born. She didn’t, but she did come away with two golds and one silver, making her the first action-sports athlete to win three medals at the same Olympics.
She also has three stuffed Bing Dwen Dwen mascots that are given to all medalists. The mascots are so popular that people stand in line for hours in the city trying to buy one. Gu got into the spirit by wearing a furry panda hat on the podium.
The 18-year-old Gu, who recently graduated from San Francisco’s University High and will attend Stanford, capped her global coming-out party Friday by winning the gold medal in women’s halfpipe. She had such a big lead after two runs that she was able to take a carefree final run down the halfpipe.
She did straight airs all the way down the pipe, gleefully punching her fists and poles downward as she vaulted herself above the lip, enjoying every last second of a victory run that meant nothing — and everything.
“I was very emotional at the top and I chose to do a victory lap,” Gu said. “Because I felt like, for the first time, I like really deserved it and I really earned it.”
She won the gold medal in the Olympic debut of women’s freeski big air in front of an old steel mill in the city. She took the silver in slopestyle on the Secret Garden course, where elements were carved out of snow to resemble portions of the Great Wall. Finally, she dominated in the halfpipe.
“She has basically set a level that’s pretty unattainable for a lot of us,” said American freeskier Carly Margulies, who finished 11th in the halfpipe.
Well known in China before these Games, Gu now is a household name around the world. Part of that had to do with the criticism she received for competing for China rather than the United States.
But a lot of it was due to her skill, confidence and personality. If there’s a face of joy at the Beijing Games, it’s Gu and her ever-present smile. It was a remarkable contrast to the tears of Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva after her shocking litany of mistakes, and the disappointment and self-doubt of U.S. skiing superstar Mikaela Shiffrin after she failed to medal in any of the five individual races she entered.
Gu is also a model and her face is on advertisements all over Beijing. She has been photographed for Vogue, Victoria’s Secret, Louis Vuitton, Tiffany and more.
Gu’s trip to China was about more than sports. About 30 months ago, she took a chance and made a statement when she decided to wear the colors of her mother’s homeland instead of those of her native United States.
She received some love and some hate for that move. She explained it time and again: She did it to inspire girls in China. There was little in the way of winter-sports culture there when she was younger. There certainly is more now.
“We’re not here to break limits for a country, we’re here to break a human limit,” Gu said.
Good intentions aside, her trip to the Olympics was ultimately destined to be gauged, at least on the outside, by how she did on the slopes. Yet again, with the pressure on and the world watching, Gu delivered. With her latest win, she stayed undefeated on the halfpipe this season.
“She’s a machine,” said defending champion Cassie Sharpe of Canada, who took silver with a performance that easily would have been golden in previous Olympics.
With winds gusting left to right on a 3 degree day, Gu put this contest to rest on her first run. It included two 900degree spins in different directions, each frosted with full, second-long reaches downward to grab her skis.
Gu scored a 93.25 for that, then on her second run, she scored two points better.
She increased the difficulty on her final jump, going for back-to-back “alley-oop” flat spins in which she starts her spin twirling up the halfpipe even though she’s traveling downhill. She landed both jumps without even a hint of a bobble.
When it comes to action sports, Gu is in the same conversation with snowboarder Shaun White, whose pressure-packed victory four years ago was an all-timer; it earned him a third gold medal over the span of 12 years.
And with her friend Chloe Kim, who has dominated her sport for a decade and left China with her second snowboarding gold in two tries.
It seemed only fitting that the final event of Gu’s freeski trifecta came in the same halfpipe where Kim won and White bid an emotional farewell to the Olympics the week before.
More than any other place in the action park, the halfpipe is where Olympic stars are born.
As Gu prepared to head down it for the first time of her last event, she placed her hands on her hips and closed her eyes, then repeated one sentence three times.
“I said ‘My name is Eileen Gu,’ ” she told reporters as tears welled up in her eyes, “and I’m the best halfpipe skier in the world.”
After the pep talk, she pulled down her goggles, took off down the hill and proved that one more time.
“I said ‘My name is Eileen Gu, and I’m the best halfpipe skier in the world.’ ”
Gu, telling reporters what she told herself before her gold-medal run.