Say what you like about Eileen Gu. Plenty have since she switched allegiances from the US to China in 2019. But the most compelling athlete at these Winter Olympic Games sure knows how to deliver. On the slopes. In front of the world’s media. And especially in the blazing heat of competition.
On the final run of a women’s halfpipe final that many in Livigno reckoned was the greatest in history, Gu stepped up again, sliding down a 22-foot wall of ice before twisting and spinning her body high into the brightest of blue skies to become these Games’ alpha female yet again – just as in Beijing four years ago.
However, there was also controversy amid the drama with the British team believing their world champion, Zoe Atkin, was harshly done by, having won bronze behind Gu. They looked to have a point. At one stage during a spectacular final run, Atkin flew five metres in the air – a metre more than Gu, who scored 94.75, and nearly two metres higher than Li Fanghui, whose 93.00 was good enough for silver. Atkin, meanwhile, was given 92.5.
“I thought that the scoring was interesting,” Vicky Gosling, the chief executive of GB Snowsport, said afterwards. “The minimum I thought she was going to get was silver. There are men that would struggle with the height Zoe actually gets. We’re absolutely delighted that we’ve got a medal. But did I take a big intake? I probably did.”
Atkin’s coach, Joe Schuster, was more diplomatic. “Judging is a tough thing. I don’t want to say anything negative,” he said. “I’m super happy. But if she had ended up higher than a bronze, I wouldn’t have been surprised.”
However, the 23-year-old Atkin was happy to have equalled her sister Izzy’s bronze from Pyeongchang 2018. “I was so stressed out and so nervous, so I’m just super stoked,” she said. “To be on the podium means so much to me.”
Schuster, though, also wanted to make another thing clear: that we had just witnessed the greatest women’s halfpipe event ever. But sadly to British eyes, it was Gu who stepped up when it mattered most.
The 22-year-old has long been a one-woman lightning rod. She is the highest-paid athlete at these Games, an IMG model and a Stanford University student. She is clearly a brilliant athlete and has a brilliant mind.
But her moral ambiguity around thorny geopolitical topics, and her decision to compete for China, has echoes of Batman’s Catwoman: someone willing to live in various shades of grey.
That said, seven of her friends from Stanford were here to support her. And, in between jumps, they were happy to talk about how brilliant but normal she was, her love of sushi and chocolate lava cake, and how her dorm room is slightly messy.
On social media in the US, a very different picture was being played out. But the sense is that Gu doesn’t care. As she reminded us afterwards, she is now the most decorated freeskier in history, having won six Olympic medals.
“I kind of liken it to a marathon, but the pace of a 100m dash,” Gu said when asked the demands of having to compete multiple times to win three medals here in Milano Cortina. “Because I had to give 100% every day.
“But I’m not afraid to try. I take big risks. And for the last two Olympics, it’s worked out. But even if it hadn’t, I think I left nothing on the table.”
Later, when she asked what it was like inside her brain, Gu gave every impression of believing she could bend the world to her will. “I’m an introspective young woman,” she said. “I spend a lot of time in my head. It’s not a bad place to be. I journal a lot. I break down all of my thought processes. I’m 22, so with neuroplasticity on my side I can literally become exactly who I want to be. How cool is that? How empowering is that, right?
“I get to become every day the kind of person that me, at age eight, would revere. I would be obsessed with me today. Are you kidding? I would love me and I think that’s the biggest flex of all time.”
It was quite some statement. Gu insisted that she was being honest, rather than egotistical. “It’s in a tinkering scientist way. I’m always trying to modify. I’m trying to think how can I be better? How can I approach my own brain the way that I approach my craft of free skiing, so that I can be better tomorrow than I was today.”
In the past Gu has been accused of almost being robotic. But at the end of a fascinating press conference she showed her human side as she broke down in tears after revealing that she had just learned that her grandmother, Feng Guozhen, had died.
“She was a really big part of my life growing up, and someone I looked up to immensely,” she said. “A lot of people just cruise through life but she was a steamship. This woman commanded life and she grabbed it by the reins and she made it into what she wanted it to be.”
As she spoke, Gu had her three medals from these Games around her neck and a gold necklace in her hair. Meanwhile, onlookers were left with one overriding thought: the apple clearly doesn’t fall far from the tree.
