The latest product that China has ripped off, refined, and resold to the United States is not a knockoff AI, or Shein leggings, or a $99 Temu tablet. It is Olympic freestyle skier Eileen Gu.
With a reported income of $23 million last year, Gu is the fourth-highest-paid woman in sports and the highest paid Olympian at this year’s games. She earned more than tennis star Naomi Osaka and basketball phenom Caitlin Clark. It’s not hard to understand why. With on-camera virtuosity to match her on-slope acrobatics, Gu is among the most poised and skilled athletes in the world. Oh, and beautiful too.
Gu, 22, was born and raised in San Francisco and attended Stanford University. Her American father is a Harvard graduate, and her mother is a Chinese national and successful businesswoman who has lived in the U.S. for decades. In the early part of her career, Gu skied for the U.S. but in 2019, she switched sides and became a competitor under the flag of the People’s Republic of China. Skiing for China, Gu won two gold medals and one silver in the 2022 Olympic Winter Games. She added a silver last week in the freeski slopestyle competition and another on Monday in the freeski big air. She has another chance in Cortina this week to add to her—and China’s—medal haul.
And yet, outside of circles portrayed as jingoistic knuckle draggers, Gu barely faces even the mildest breeze of criticism.
In a recent New York Times profile of Gu, the only condemnations came from the mouths of those not given much credence by the paper’s readers. “Right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson, then at Fox News, described her choice [to compete for China] as ‘dumb’ while the channel’s co-host Will Cain said she was ‘ungrateful’ and had ‘betrayed America,’ ” reported the Times.
