This time Eileen Gu didn’t leave things late. After her first two events at the Winter Games came down to nail-biting finishes, the emerging American-born superstar representing China lay waste to all-comers in the Olympic freeski halfpipe final, adding to her big air gold and slopestyle silver to complete an unprecedented hat-trick of medals in the mountains north west of Beijing.
The 18-year-old soared into history on Friday morning in becoming the first action-sports athlete to win three medals at a single Olympics – missing out on triple gold by a fraction of a point in Tuesday’s slopestyle – making good on years of hype that only intensified in the months leading up to the Beijing Games and grew to deafening levels over the past fortnight as her culture-straddling origin story has become the subject of intense public scrutiny on both sides of the Pacific.
