With another Olympic gold medal added to her collection, San Francisco teenager Eileen Gu says she has bigger goals ahead after she completed her historic run at the Beijing Games.
Gu became the first action-sports athlete to win three medals at the same Winter Olympics by claiming the gold in Friday’s freestyle skiing halfpipe. She already had won a gold in big air and silver in slopestyle.Oakland City Council Approves A's Howard Terminal Ball Park Final Environmental Impact Report
“People sometimes don’t know what to do with other people when they’re not fitting in a box,” said the skier, whose mother emigrated to the United States some three decades ago. “They say, ‘Is she Chinese? Is she American? Is she a model? Is she a student? Why is she trying to change the world when she’s only 18?’”
She is far too quick with a story, or a quip, to be cast as — the way some of her critics suggest — a coached-up, pre-scripted purveyor of rote talking points programmed specifically for this moment. “My biggest goal is for some girl to be sitting at home watching freeskiing for the first time and thinking, ‘Maybe that could be me some day,’” Gu said. “Maybe she sees someone who looks like her doing it and thinks, ‘Hey, I can do that, too.’”There are between 9 million and 12 million skiers in the United States, depending on whose statistics you use — and a fraction of those hit terrain parks, the likes of which Gu has been lighting up most of her life, and at the Olympics.
Most of this criticism comes from the internet with some shade thrown in by conservative media in the U.S. Fox News’ Tucker Carlson: “It’s ungrateful for her to turn her back on the country that not just raised her, but turned her into a world-class skier.” Often forgotten amid all the hand-wringing about Gu’s nationality is that the action sports — snowboarding and freeskiing — have traditionally cared the least about what flag goes on whose uniform.
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