Meet Eileen Gu, an American competing for China at Winter Olympics

The People’s Republic of China named a 126-athlete squad for the upcoming 2026 Winter Olympics. This contingent of athletes, China’s largest-ever team for an overseas Winter Games, heads to Italy to compete across 15 disciplines.

One of their gold medal favorites was born in San Francisco, and began her Olympic journey competing for Team USA’s youth ranks at just nine years old.

Meet Eileen Gu.

Born in San Francisco in 2003, Gu is the daughter of Yan Gu, a first-generation Chinese immigrant to the United States, and an American father. Yan, who graduated with a master’s degree in chemical engineering at Peking University — where she competed on the short-track speed skating team — returned to the United States to attend Stanford business school. She also raised Gu as a single mother.

Gu started her athletic journey as a skier at Lake Tahoe, and she eventually jioned the Northstar California Resort’s free-ski team when she was just eight years old.

She won her first national championship a year later.

In an interview with Time, Gu called those years “integral” to her relationship with her mother. Yan would driver her daughter from their home in the San Francisco area to train in Lake Tahoe on the weekends, a four-hour trip each way.

“It was integral to our relationship,” said Gu.

Gu also spent her summers in Beijing, studying mathematics at Gaosi Education, a private tutoring center. “My mother told me that having math classes in China for 10 days would be equivalent to an entire year’s worth of learning in the U.S.,” Gu once told a Chinese media outlet.

It was one of those summers when Gu learned that the 2022 Winter Games would be held in Beijing. 

She told her mother she would be at those games, and thanking people in Chinese.

Gu indeed attended those games, but as a member of the Chinese National Team. It was not without some controversy. After starting her freestyle career competing for Team USA — finishing 11th, second, and first in three slopestyle World Cup events during the 2018-2019 — she entertained the idea of competing for China. Team USA made their best pitch as Tiger Shaw, the President and CEO of U.S. Ski and Snowboard met with Gu and Yan in Utah to lay out a plan for how Team USA would be the best fit.

In the end, a 15-year-old Gu chose to ski for the Chinese Ski Association, viewing the decision as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help to promote the sport I love:”

For example, the Washington Times blasted Gu and other American athletes competing for China as “betraying” the United States. Former United States Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley slammed her for “standing for human rights abuses.” Bill Maher called her a “living symbol of China’s triumph over the west:”

And Fox News, well, you can probably expect how they approached the story, with Will Cain telling Tucker Carlson that it was “ungrateful” of Gu to “betray” and “turn her back” on America.

Again, Gu was 15 years old at the time, and she viewed the decision as a way to promote the sport in China, where more representation was needed in her mind, particularly for young girls.

“The U.S. already has the representation,” says Gu. “I like building my own pond.” 

Of course, this all put a tremendous amount of pressure on Gu by the time the games rolled around. When it was time for her final run in her first event, big air, both a gold medal and the thoughts of a nation were on the line.

She dared to try something she had never even attempted in practice, a double cork 1620, requiring 4-and-a-half spins in the air while rotating off her axis twice. Yan tried to talk her out of it, but Gu insisted.

“My whole thing was, it’s all upside,” recalls Gu. “Because if I land, I will win the Olympics. If I don’t land, then I get to make history as the first person to ever try this trick in such a situation. It’s a decision that I would be super proud of and live with forever.”

Gu nailed it:

“It was like the definition of a perfect play,” said NBC commentator Tom Wallisch. 

It was more than that. Much more. Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee at the time, told Yan it was the most emotional moment he had witnessed at an Olympic Games. “With all the discussions in the U.S. and China, everybody felt obliged to make comments, extremely stupid some of them,” said Bach after down from his position in June 2025. “I don’t need to be so diplomatic anymore.” 

But the controversy continued, even after winning her first gold medal. Questions were raised about her citizenship status, as China does not allow for dual citizenship which raises questions over whether she has given up her American citizenship. Gu has demurred when asked those questions, acknowledging bigger “geopolitical factors” to the situation. “There are geopolitical factors at play, and people just hate China generally. So it’s kind of difficult when I’m lumped in with this evil monolith that people want to dislike,” said Gu to Time. “It’s never really about me and my skiing.”

However, she also points to the increase in Chinese athletes participating in winter events since the 2022 Beijing Games, as another accomplishment. “I’ve made a lot of positive impact at nobody’s expense,” says Gu. “And I genuinely mean this without a hint of sardonic humor: use the time and creativity that it takes to craft some of these insults to think about what your talents are, and how you can use them to make the world better.”

Now Gu is headed to another Olympics, having bounced back from a training injury suffered in August of 2025. She’s among the favorites in all three events — big air, halfpipe, and slopestyle — and will again be competing for China, as she confirmed in January of 2024.

And she’s aiming to top her effort from 2022.

“It’s a much bigger challenge to do something multiple times than to do it one time,” says Gu. “What you don’t want to do is enter the defense thing, where you’re fearful. ‘Everybody’s on my tail. I’m looking back.’ That’s all wrong. And I don’t think that’s what I’m doing.

“I train like I’ve never won. And I compete like I’ve never lost.”