15 minute read
Eileen Gu
Words EVELYN SPENCE Photography CHRISTIAN ANWANDER
Ready to launch
Like all 18-year-olds, EILEEN GU has plans. To do well when she starts university next term, to become a world-champion freeskier, and to symbolise harmony between the two biggest superpowers. The usual stuff…
Aanother two golds and a bronze, at the Freestyle World Ski Championships – the first freeskier to do so. And she achieved it without using poles, due to a broken hand.
Yet even these achievements fail to do justice to the considerable talents of Eileen Gu: a goldmedal hopeful this February, accomplished runner, successful model, feminist, aspiring diplomat, and one of the few athletes in the world who excels at all three freeskiing disciplines (pipe, slopestyle and big air) when most elites struggle to train for just one.
It’s late October 2021, and Gu is trying to describe how she fills her day. She’s in a car in the t the 100-day mark before the opening ceremony Alps, making a rolling transition between a month of the forthcoming Olympics in Beijing, the of halfpipe training in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and organising committee released a lavishly produced several weeks of jumps camp on Austria’s Stubai short film titled A Date with Snow and Ice. In it, Glacier. So far this autumn she has taken classes a boy meets a girl in an icy wasteland and together on micro- and macroeconomics. She also listens to they journey to the Games in a mash-up of pop astrophysics lectures and reads quantum mechanics culture and snow sports. The boy is played by textbooks. “When I dropped into the X Games last 20-year-old Chinese actor and singer Jackson Yee, winter, everybody else’s announcement was like, a megastar in his home country. The girl is Eileen ‘This is so-and-so, won gold in Pyeongchang; this is
Gu, an 18-year-old Chinese-American freeskier born the first person to land this trick,’” says Gu. “Mine in California. At the end of the film, to a backdrop was, ‘Eileen Gu – got a 1580 on the SAT and was of epic choral music, she runs along the Great Wall admitted to Stanford.’” For those unfamiliar with in slow motion, holding aloft the torch. As a parable, US academic scores, that means she’s crushing it. the message is clear: Eileen Gu has arrived. And yet If it isn’t already clear, Gu is a rarity in the world she has barely begun. of freeskiing. Not because she’s book-smart, It’s hard to say exactly when Gu truly arrived, physically gifted, or what any sane person would but one contest stands out. In the span of around characterise as busy (which she indisputably is), but 36 hours in January 2021, she won two golds and a bronze at the Winter X Games in Aspen,
Colorado, becoming the first rookie to podium in three events, and the first Chinese athlete in history to win a gold at the competition. But even then she was far from unknown, having notched Eileen Gu is a
World Cup wins at Calgary, Canada, in 2020 and Seiser Alm, Italy, in 2019, and two golds and rarity in the world a silver at the Lausanne 2020 Winter Youth Games. Six weeks after her X Games victories, Gu took of freeskiing
Aiming high: Gu boosts out of the Superpipe at Woodward Mountain Park in Copper Mountain Resort, Colorado
Gu’s modelling has turned a niche sports star into a mainstream idol
Fashion icon: luxury brands including Tiffany and Louis Vuitton have signed up Gu to promote their products
because she’s a true student of every dimension of her skiing and her life. “She visualises each trick extremely carefully and knows exactly what she’s capable of,” says her coach, Misra Noto.
“Calculated” is how eight-time Winter X Games slopestyle champion Kaya Turski describes Gu’s skiing. The same applies during off-snow training. “With every rep, Eileen is trying to make it more perfect than the last one,” says Alex Bunt, a strength and conditioning coach for Red Bull. “Most of us find stretching boring, but she wants to do the stretch better.”
In Saas-Fee, Gu was practising a new pipe sequence incorporating three new tricks and a new combination. She’s the only woman in the world who can put together a run where every trick is corked – tilted off-axis like a spinning top that’s about to fall over but somehow rights itself to keep flying downhill. Every day, she was on the mountain at 10am, off by 3pm, and not a minute was wasted. “Eileen is the hardest-working female skier I know,” remarks Noto, who, as a former coach of the Swiss slopestyle team, has overseen the development of dozens of athletes.
If Gu’s skiing transcends categorisation, so too does her life, or, as she classifies it, lives – sometimes two (skier and student), sometimes four (those plus runner and model) – and her dual heritage. Although born in San Francisco and trained on the slopes of Northstar – a ski resort on the Californian side of Lake Tahoe – she chose, at the age of 15, to represent China at this year’s Games. Her mother, Yan, is from Beijing, and Gu has travelled there every summer since she was two. She went to school in Beijing, has friends and a house there, and is fluent in Mandarin, though without the accent. “When I’m in America, I’m American,” she has said enough times that it sounds like a mantra. “When I’m in China, I’m Chinese.”
When she was 10, Gu met the owner of a ski resort in China and convinced him to hold a freeskiing open – the first freeski contest in a country that’s just starting to embrace the sport. “Since the beginning, we’ve known the really small circle of people involved in the [Chinese] skiing community, and grown alongside them,” she says. In the two-plus years since she announced her allegiance, Gu – nicknamed “the snow princess” and “genius skier girl” by the Chinese press – has become recognised on the streets of Beijing; a dazzling rise from ingenuous high-schooler to the most prominent face of skiing in the most populous nation on Earth. “Eileen could well be the next Lindsey Vonn or Chloe Kim – transcending the sport,” says Turski. “She’s in the perfect position of age, talent and support.” In China, that’s already happening.
Gu’s journey to this moment was far from typical. Her mother emigrated to the US in her twenties, studied biochemistry at Rockefeller University, and skied for the first time at Hunter Mountain in New York, before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area and earning an MBA at Stanford. When Gu was three, Yan enrolled her in ski school in Tahoe so her daughter could keep up with her. At eight, Gu joined Northstar’s freeskiing team – the only girl – because Yan thought racing was too dangerous. Soon, she was winning contests consistently, including nationals at the age of nine.
Everywhere she went, her mum was by her side. Turski recalls meeting Gu in New Zealand: “A lady came up to me and said, ‘Hi, this is my daughter,’ and Eileen was just this 4ft-tall, excited mini-ripper.” At home in San Francisco, Gu lives with her grandmother, Guo Zhenseng, now 86. “My grandma is fierce, the most competitive person I know,” she says of the matriarch who taught her three-digit-bythree-digit multiplication when she was four years old. The best thing her mum did for her is give her a bunch of options: piano, ballet, soccer, basketball, horseback riding, archery, rock climbing, volleyball, tennis. “My mum is very rational, overprepared and practical, but this isn’t a ‘tiger mum’ situation,” says Gu, referencing the stereotype of Chinese parents pushing their children to achieve at a young age. “It was more that if I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it well, because otherwise it’s a waste of my time. That was my grandma’s way of seeing things, my mum’s, and my way, too.”
What makes Gu’s X Games breakthrough especially significant is that the 2020-21 season was the first in which she wasn’t in school full-time. Until she’d graduated from high school in 2020 – the first student at the prestigious San Francisco University High School to do so in just three years – Gu had never skied more than 65 days a year (her competitive peers average closer to 250), driving four hours to Tahoe with Yan every weekend while doing homework in the car. It forced her to adopt an aggressive work ethic on and off the slopes and allowed her to enjoy regular teenage experiences when she came home. “I had the most normal childhood compared with
Flight school: Gu gets big air at the Stomping Grounds Projects training camp in SaasFee, Switzerland, in October 2020
anybody else on the World Cup circuit,” she says. “Nobody knew about my skiing or cared.” According to her sophomore-year history teacher, Chris Martin, she sat in the front row, diligently taking notes. When she travelled to Europe, Gu would give the other students lessons on Italian art and architecture, learned in her Western Civilisation class. “She was remarkably humble for someone so accomplished, and extremely kind,” Martin says. “She presents as confident, which she should be, but not in an offputting way.” Gu was such a fast cross-country runner she almost chose it over skiing – partly because it’s a college-recruitment sport – but when a World Cup was scheduled at the same time as a state championship meet, she bought a last-minute ticket to Austria.
For people who don’t ski, it’s hard to appreciate how challenging it is to compete at a world-class level across pipe, slopestyle and big air. For example, one discipline might require you to initiate a grab earlier or explode higher; in pipe you can perform the same run throughout the season, but slopestyle requires tailored sequences for each course. “It’s taxing on your body,” says American medal-winning freestyle skier Nick Goepper, “and logistically difficult because the contests can be at different locations.” Ask what sets Gu apart and, depending on the person, you’ll get variations on a theme. For elite freestyle skier and eight-time X Games medallist Bobby Brown, it’s her rails: “I’ve known her since she was 10 or 11, rockin’ her purple helmet, and her rail prowess was already crazy.” For Noto, Gu’s amplitude in the pipe is the most impressive – an average of 3.4m above the lip at the X Games. For Turski, it’s her versatility no matter the discipline. Whichever way you look at it, Gu has huge range and the potential to match. “I can’t yet say that she will be the most successful skier ever,” says Noto, “but she has the tools to do it.”
In 2015, when China was granted this year’s Games, it announced plans to build 800 ski resorts in time for the event. The nation is projected to soon be the world’s largest winter sports market, with 50 million participants by 2025 and 1,000 ski resorts by 2030. “In the beginning, I knew every single person in the park because there were only 10 or 20 of us in the whole country,” says Gu. “Now it’s the trendiest place to be.” The rapid growth of skiing in China dovetailed with Gu’s own development, and she saw an opening that only she could fill. “In the US, I grew up with all these idols, and I wanted to be that for somebody else,” she says. The next generation of American freeskiers already
had plenty of empowered, talented female role models; as agonising as the decision to represent China at the Games was, Gu knew – even at the age of 15 – that she could elevate freeskiing in the Chinese national consciousness and inspire a new generation of women.
For Gu, her duality is seamless and – with an ability to adapt to different etiquettes, make subtle code-switches and read the room – an asset. “Being fluent in English and Mandarin, I was able to absorb the nuances of both societies from a really young age, appreciate them, and display them back,” she says. Gu is also in a unique position to symbolise the unity and friendship the Games strives to celebrate, and she recognises that role. “I’ve realised the impact that sport can have on diplomacy,” she says. “It can be shared regardless of language, of culture, of political affiliation.”
But first there’s the preparation. Last summer, when Gu flew to China for a tour of sponsorship obligations, she had to quarantine in a hotel room by herself for five weeks, with only a treadmill, yoga mat and some light weights. It was her chance to work purely on fitness, hammering out daily three-to-four-hour Zoom sessions with Bunt, who concentrated on upping her explosive power (for amplitude), moving through every rotational plane (for tricks), and building resiliency to injury. Even through a screen, he was blown away by her coordination and body awareness. “I could tell Eileen to adjust her left pinkie toe during an exercise and she’d get it right away,” he says. “She knows exactly where she is in space.” Though it’s not common for skiers to double as distance runners, Bunt sees Gu’s baseline endurance as a huge asset. “She already has a really big gas tank, so she can handle the hurt of a high volume of training. But five weeks alone? That speaks to her character.”
After quarantine, Gu travelled to a different city every few days. Her former schedule of balancing skiing, running, piano and school seems almost quaint now. “The past two years, I’ve gone in the most polar opposite direction from a normal childhood,” she says. While skiing is what initially brought Gu attention, it’s modelling that has transformed her from a niche action-sports celebrity to something closer to a mainstream idol. At 15, she was invited to Paris Fashion Week by a Chinese brand, and she has since featured in Chinese editions of Elle and Vogue, been picked up by high-end
The Chinese press nicknamed Gu “the snow princess”
companies including Tiffany and Louis Vuitton, and – alongside Megan Rapinoe, Valentina Sampaio and Priyanka Chopra Jonas – joined the rebranding of Victoria’s Secret. “I get to represent a biracial perspective, a crossover between sport and art, and a respect for your body,” she says. “Because no matter what I’m doing, my body is my job.”
For Gu, fashion is both a complement to skiing and a reprieve from it. “It’s almost the same as skiing, where if you do tricks with individual style it’s celebrated,” she says. Just as she does at the top of a run, Gu thrives off the adrenalin of photoshoots – the attention, perfectionism and out-and-out challenge – such as for her Vogue Hong Kong cover: in a tank top, hair frozen, laying upside-down on a block of real ice for an hour and a half while being snowed on. Still, she’s able to put a philosophical slant on it: “Fashion is an opportunity to show a different facet of yourself, especially as a young person discovering who you want to be. It’s almost playing dress-up, experimenting with personas and seeing which suits you best.”
It all adds up to a lot of pressure – from sponsors, from her country, from herself – but Gu is hardwired to handle it. She knows no one can take away the things she’s already achieved; that it’s not fair to expect one person to win all the time; that she doesn’t need to validate herself at the top of every run. “This past year and a half, my understanding of pressure has been really positive,” she says. “It has built my confidence rather than made me feel I have something to prove.” And as the attention intensifies in the lead-up to this year’s Games, she feels emboldened: “I don’t think it has affected my skiing. If anything, it has made me better.”
What truly sets Gu apart – more than being a multi-hyphenate with kick-ass academic grades – is her mental game. “The second I give her a task, she just locks in,” says Bunt. “Her biggest strength is her focus, with everything, every moment, every day.” Ask Gu how she does it and she doesn’t credit sports psychologists or meditation exercises, but rather her mum, her grandma, and her habit of journalling. Sometimes she writes about a meal she liked; sometimes it’s a “deep dissection of what adolescents need”, she says. “I can look back and see my growth, and it’s really grounding – and motivating. I’m figuring out how my mind works.”
She hopes to publish her writing as a memoir someday. And when she does, the world might just be able to understand how Eileen Gu rose to meet her moment – beyond and beneath the obvious qualities that make her an impending superstar. “Eileen is smart, she’s hardworking, and she has incredible discipline,” says Turski. “She’s beautiful and she can already handle the demands. I’m excited to see not only what she does in skiing, but what she does for skiing. If it all lines up for her in China, she’s going to rocket launch.” Discover more about Eileen Gu in the documentary Everyday Eileen on Red Bull TV; redbull.com
