16 minute read
Ready for Liftoff
With one foot in China and the other in the U.S., freeskier and multihyphenate megatalent Eileen Gu is poised for greatness.
Words EVELYN SPENCE Photography CHRISTIAN ANWANDER
“I’ve realized the impact that sports can have on diplomacy,” says Gu, who was shot in SaasFee, Switzerland, on October 21.
Gu has style and smarts—and she also has gold medals from the Winter X Games, World Championships and Winter Youth Olympics.
She’s only 18, but Eileen Gu— Olympic freeskiing hopeful, twoevent 2021 X Games gold medalist, ambidextrous spinner, accomplished runner, high-end model, feminist, aspiring diplomat—is in a car in the heart of the Alps, making a rolling transition between a month of halfpipe training in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and several weeks of jumps camp on the Stubai Glacier in Austria. It’s late October. Gu is trying to describe how she fills her day—this, from an athlete who is one of the very few women in the world who excels at all three freeskiing disciplines (pipe, slopestyle and big air) in a sport where most elites find it grueling to train for just one. So far this fall, she’s taken classes on micro- and macroeconomics. She listens to astrophysics lectures. She reads quantum mechanics textbooks on set. “When I dropped into X Games last winter, everybody else’s announcement was like, ‘This is so-and-so, Olympic medalist!’ ‘This is the first person to land this trick!’” says Gu. “And my little bio was, ‘Eileen Gu! Got a 1580 on the SAT and was admitted to Stanford!’”
If it isn’t already clear, Gu is a rarity in the world of freeskiing. Not because she’s book smart, or physically gifted, or what any sane person would characterize as busy—all things that she absolutely, indisputably is. It’s because she is a true student of every dimension of her skiing and her life: efficient, focused, diligent and impeccable. “She visualizes each trick extremely carefully, and she knows exactly what she is capable of and can execute,” says her coach, Misra Noto. Eight-time X Games slopestyle champ Kaya Turski calls Gu’s skiing calculated—not sinister, not frosty, but clever and exquisitely honed. The same goes during off-snow training. “Every single rep, Eileen is trying to make it more perfect than the last one,” says Red Bull strength and conditioning coach Alex Bunt. “Most of us find stretching boring, but she wants to do the stretch better.”
In Saas-Fee, Gu was practicing a new pipe sequence with 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 10 a.m., off by 3 p.m.—and while that may sound easygoing, not a single minute was wasted. Noto, a former pro who used to coach the Swiss slopestyle team, has overseen the development of dozens of athletes. And, he says, “Eileen is the hardestworking female skier I know.”
Gu is, to be fair, a little bit complicated. Not angsty—if she has any teenage torment, it has an analytical poise to it. Rather, she admits to living multiple lives, sometimes two (skier and student), sometimes four (those plus runner and model). And that’s not counting the fact that, although she was born in San Francisco and came up on the slopes of Northstar on Lake Tahoe, she chose, at age 15, to compete for China in international competition. Her mother, Yan, is from Beijing, and Gu has traveled there every summer since she was 2 years old. She’s fluent in Mandarin—no accent. She has gone to school in Beijing. She has friends there, a house. “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.”
Gu balances her life as an elite athlete and as a serious student with a highly successful modeling career, evinced by these recent magazine covers.
When she was 10, Gu met the owner of a ski resort in China and convinced him to hold a freeskiing open—which became 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 skiing community, and we’ve grown alongside them,” she says. In the two-plus years since she announced her allegiance, Gu—sometimes known in China as “snow princess,” sometimes as “genius skier girl”—is now recognized on the streets of Beijing, making a dazzling rise from ingenuous high schooler to the most prominent face of skiing in the most populous nation on earth. To say that the stars are aligning for Gu makes it sound like her trajectory has been shaped by mysterious forces, but the design is largely hers. Still, the convergence is uncanny. “Eileen seems to be primed in the perfect position with age, talent and support,” says Turski. “She could well be the next Lindsey Vonn or Chloe Kim, transcending the sport.”
In China, it’s already happening. At the 100-day mark before the opening ceremonies, the Beijing Organizing Committee released a lavish short film, A Date with Snow and Ice, in which a young boy (mega-celeb Jackson Yee, one of the most popular singers in the country) meets a young girl (Gu), and they go to the Games together in a mash-up of pop culture and sport. As a parable, the message is clear: Eileen Gu has already arrived, and yet she has barely begun.
At the end of the film, to the sound of dramatic music, there she is, running along the Great Wall in slow motion, carrying an Olympic torch.
It’s hard to say, exactly, when Gu arrived. But one contest stands out: In the span of about 36 hours in late January 2021, she won two golds and a bronze at the X Games—becoming the first rookie to medal in three events and the first Chinese athlete in history to win a gold. She wasn’t an unknown; she’d already notched World Cup wins at Calgary 2020 and Seiser Alm, Italy, and two golds and a silver at the 2020 Winter Youth Olympic Games in Lausanne, Switzerland.
But her journey to that moment was far from typical. Gu’s mother immigrated to the United States in her 20s, studied biochemistry at Rockefeller University, and skied for the first time at Hunter Mountain in New York—then moved to the Bay Area and earned an MBA at Stanford. When Gu was 3 years old, Yan put her in ski school in Tahoe so her daughter could keep up with her. At the age of 8, Gu joined Northstar’s freeskiing team—as the only girl—because Yan thought racing was too dangerous. Soon, she was winning USA Snowboard and Freeski Association contests consistently, including nationals at age 9.
Everywhere she went, her mother was by her side. Turski first met Gu in New Zealand when “a little lady came up to me and said, ‘Hi, this is my daughter,’ and Eileen was just this 4-foot-tall excited mini-ripper,” she says. At home in San Francisco, Gu also lived—and still lives—with her grandmother, Guo Zhenseng, now 86. “My grandma is fierce, the most competitive person I know, which is saying a lot coming from me,” she says. “And my mom is very rational, overprepared and practical.” Her grandma taught her, when she was just a 4-yearold, three-digit-by-three-digit multiplication. The best thing her mom did for her, she says, was to give her a bunch of options: piano, ballet, soccer, basketball, horseback riding, archery, rock climbing, volleyball, tennis. But there was no pressure to excel. “This isn’t a tiger mom situation,” she says. “It was more that it’s an inability to fail. 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, and tangentially, my mom’s and my way, too.”
“No matter what I’m doing, my body is my job.”
Born to an American father and a Chinese mother, Gu began representing China in competition in June 2019.
At first glance, what makes Gu’s X Games breakthrough especially surprising is that the 2020–21 season was the first in which she wasn’t in school full-time. Until she graduated from high school in 2020—in only three years, the first student at her prestigious school ever to do so—she never skied more than 65 days a year, driving four hours up to Tahoe with Yan every weekend while doing homework in the car. (The average number of ski days for her competitors? More like 250.) It forced her to have an aggressive work ethic both on and off the slopes. And it allowed her to go back home for regular teenage experiences. “I had the most normal childhood compared to anybody else on the World Cup circuit,” she says. “A lot of people didn’t get to go to prom—or feel excluded at the high school lunch table. Nobody knew about my skiing, and nobody cared.” According to her sophomore-year history teacher, Chris Martin, she sat in the front row, diligently taking notes. When she traveled to Europe, she would give the other students lessons on Italian art and architecture that she learned in her Western Civ class. “She was remarkably humble for someone so accomplished, and extremely kind,” he says. “She presents as confident, which she should be, but not in a way that’s at all offputting.” Gu was such a fast crosscountry runner that 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—or people who ski but prefer to keep their bases on snow—it’s hard to appreciate how challenging it is to compete at a world-class level in pipe, slopestyle and big air. In one, you might initiate a grab earlier or try to explode higher—a halfpipe cork 7 isn’t exactly a slopestyle cork 7. You can perform the same pipe run throughout the season, but every slopestyle course is different and requires different sequences. “Not only is it logistically difficult, because the contests can be at different places, but it’s really taxing on your body,” says two-time Olympic medalist Nick Goepper. If you ask what sets Gu apart, you’ll get variations on a theme. For elite freestyle skier 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,” says the eight-time X Games medalist. For Noto, Gu’s amplitude in the pipe is the most impressive—11 feet above the lip, on average, at the X Games. For Turski, it’s her versatility—left and right spins, switch and forward skiing—no matter the discipline. Whatever way you parse it, Gu has a gigantic range and a potential to match. “I can’t yet say that she will be the most successful skier ever,” says Noto, “but she has all the tools to do it.”
Regarding the frequent questions about her nationality, Gu has a position statement: “When I’m in America, I’m American. When I’m in China, I’m Chinese.”
Gu says that modeling is a lot like elite freeskiing: “It’s a creative way to show the world who you are while celebrating individuality.”
In 2015, when China was granted the 2022 Games, it announced plans to build 800 ski resorts. It’s 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. Even though the decision to compete for China was agonizing, she already knew, at 15, the ramifications. “In the U.S., I grew up with all these idols, and I wanted to be that for somebody else,” she says. Translation: The next generation of American freeskiers already has plenty of empowered, talented female athletes as role models. They don’t need her the way China does, where she can elevate freeskiing into the national consciousness and, she says, inspire a new generation of women.
When I’m in America, I’m American. When I’m in China, I’m Chinese. For Gu, it seems, her duality is seamless and has become yet another asset: the ability to adapt to different circumstances, make subtle code-switches and read the room. “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. On a grander scale, she’s in a unique position to symbolize the unity and friendship that every Olympics hopes to glorify. And she understands her role. “I’ve realized the impacts that sports can have on diplomacy,” she says. “It can be shared regardless of language, regardless of culture, regardless of political affiliation.”
But first, there’s the preparation: Last summer, when Gu flew to China for a tour of sponsorship obligations throughout the country, she had to quarantine in a hotel room by herself—with only a treadmill, a yoga mat and some light weights—for five weeks. It was her chance to work on fitness and fitness alone, hammering out daily three- to fourhour Zoom sessions with Alex Bunt, who concentrated on upping her explosive power (for amplitude), moving through every rotational plane (for tricks), and building injury resiliency (this is an extreme sport we’re talking about). Even from afar, 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’s a movement expert. 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, both physically and mentally,” he says. “But five weeks alone? That’s insane. Maybe that speaks to her character.”
After quarantine, Gu traveled to a different city every few days. Simply balancing skiing, running, piano and school—like she used to—seems almost quaint now. “The past two years I’ve gone in the most polar opposite direction that I can possibly go from a normal childhood,” she says. While skiing is what initially brought Gu attention, it’s modeling that has transformed her from a niche action-sport celebrity to something closer to mainstream idolatry. At 15, she was invited to Paris Fashion Week by a Chinese brand, and has since been featured in Chinese editions of Elle and Vogue, picked up by high-end companies like Tiffany & Co. and Louis Vuitton, and joined the rebranding of Victoria’s Secret alongside Megan Rapinoe, Valentina Sampaio and Priyanka Chopra Jonas. “I get to represent a
Along with Megan Rapinoe and Suni Lee, Gu made her debut with Victoria’s Secret at the 2021 Met Gala at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in September.
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—and a reprieve from—skiing. “It’s a creative way to show the world who you are while celebrating individuality that is difficult to find in other aspects of daily life,” she says. “It’s almost the same as skiing, where if you do tricks with individual style, it’s celebrated. It’s one of the criteria in contests.”
Not only that, she thrives off the adrenaline of photo shoots, just as she does at the top of a run— the attention, the striving for perfection, the outand-out challenge. (Here’s one: Gu, in a tank top, hair frozen, laying upside-down on a block of real ice for an hour and a half while it’s snowing on her.) But she’s still able to put a trademark philosophical slant on it. “Fashion is an opportunity to show a different facet of yourself, especially as a young person discovering what kind of person you want to be,” she says. “It’s almost like playing dress-up, experimenting with different personas and seeing which one suits you best.” She’s always been interested in journalism, so, ever the student, she is writing and directing a short film for Vogue China and guest-editing an upcoming edition—choosing photos, making creative decisions, casting.
If it sounds like Gu’s under a lot of pressure, she is—from sponsors, from her country, from herself. But she seems hardwired to handle it with grace and perspective. She knows that no one can take away the things she has already achieved. She believes that she doesn’t have to validate herself every time she’s at the top of a run. And she recognizes that, given the uncertainty that goes into the sport—weather, course layout, fatigue, injuries—it’s not fair to expect one person to win all the time. “This past year and a half, my understanding of pressure has been really positive,” she says. “It has built my confidence rather than make me feel as though I have something to prove.” What she wants to prove is how hard she has worked. She knows she is being observed more, especially in China, and it will only intensify come February. “But I don’t think it has affected my skiing in any way,” she says. “If anything, it’s made me better.”
Above all, that’s what truly sets Gu apart—more than being a hyphenate with kick-ass standardized test scores: It’s her concentration and perspective, her mental game. Noto says as much, and so does Bunt: “The second I give her a task, she just locks in,” he says. “Her biggest strength is her focus, with everything, every moment, every day.” If you ask Gu how she does it—a sports psychologist? meditation? —she mentions her mom, her grandma, her habit of journaling. Which, if you see her first and foremost as a student and an analyst, isn’t a surprise. 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 is really grounding—and also really 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 exactly how she rose to meet her moment —beyond and beneath all the obvious qualities that make her an impending superstar. “Eileen is smart, hardworking and she has incredible discipline. She’s beautiful, and she can already handle the demands. I mean, she’s got a really special package,” says Turski. “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.” Check out a new series on Gu’s frenetic life, Everyday Eileen, at redbull.com/everydayeileen.
If things go well at the 2022 Games, Gu is poised to become the kind of star athlete who transcends alpine sports.
