Switzerland’s Mathilde Gremaud soared to gold in the Olympic women’s freeski slopestyle final after holding off another last-gasp charge by Eileen Gu, the American-born emerging superstar representing China, who settled for silver by the narrowest of margins but stayed on course for a historic treble at the Beijing Games.
The 22-year-old Gremaud, who snuck into the final with the 12th-highest score in qualifying and scored a meagre 1.00 on her first of three runs on Tuesday after breaking a binding and losing a ski, roared back with an 86.56 on her second attempt to leapfrog the gaggle of favourites atop the leaderboard.
Gu was in eighth place after taking a tumble on her second trip down the course, but the San Francisco-born freestyler competing for her mother’s home nation delivered under pressure once again, putting down a clean, controlled final run for a score of 86.23 – a scant 0.33 points behind Gremaud’s benchmark – to add a silver medal to her big air gold from last week.
Kelly Sildaru took home bronze, becoming the first athlete from Estonia to win an Olympic medal in freestyle skiing on a bitterly cold -22C (-7F) morning in the mountain village of Taizicheng roughly 120km northwest of Beijing.
Sheffield’s Katie Summerhayes put down three complete runs that pleased the British team by the finish area, but was unable to challenge the frontrunners and finished in eighth, one place ahead of the talented Aberdeen teenager Kirsty Muir.
“It really came down to the last run again,” a beaming Gu said. “I don’t know why I keep doing it to myself. It doesn’t make it easy for myself. It certainly doesn’t make it easy for my coaches, and my mom has a heart attack every day. It’s definitely not the easiest, but I’m happy that I was able to push through and turn that pressure into fuel and it feels so, so good.”
Eleven entrants competed in the three-run final on Tuesday with the best score counting towards their final position. The frigid conditions further complicated their attempts down the 665-metre course filled with rails and jumps, which featured a carved-out replica of China’s Great Wall designed to protect the runners from strong westerly winds.
With the weight of more than a billion people on her shoulders and the sounds of Lady Gaga and $uicideboy$ playing through her earbuds, Gu has flashed her ability to thrive under pressure repeatedly throughout an Olympics that she’s very much the face of here. The 18-year-old was in danger of missing the big air final entirely after a ski popped off on her second run, but she confidently landed her last attempt, then won the gold from third place entering her final run by throwing down a 1620, a four-and-a-half-revolution manoeuvre that she had never even attempted in practice, much less in competition.
When Monday’s slopestyle qualifier finally took place after a 24-hour postponement, Gu avoided a shock exit after an error-strewn opening attempt, putting down an impressive second run to book her place in the final.
Then on Tuesday, Gu fell on her second trip after over-rotating on the third rail and dropped into eighth. Once more, she saved the best for last, putting down a standout run including a double-cork 900 punctuated with a Buick grab that came within a fraction of a point of catching Gremaud, who took the silver four years ago in Pyeongchang less than 36 hours after suffering a head injury in a training crash.
“I think I was feeling a little bit tired mentally after big air,” Gu said. “In my first and second run I wasn’t fully in it. I wasn’t in the zone, I wasn’t feeling that rush, that excitement. I felt almost too calm, which sometimes doesn’t work out the best. I’m one of those people that kind of needs to have the pressure on and I was happy that I was able to put it down.”
Gu remains on track to become the first action-sports athlete to capture three medals at a single Winter Olympics. She is a hot favourite in the halfpipe competition, which starts with qualifying on Thursday, having won gold in the discipline at last year’s world championships in Aspen.
The precocious teenager was already well on her way to becoming a household name even before these Olympics, with more than 1.3m followers on Weibo, a growing profile as a supermodel after signing with IMG that earned her an invite to the Met Gala, and a roster of more than 20 sponsors including Cadillac, Tiffany, Fendi, Estee Lauder and Victoria’s Secret. But her delicate, if lucrative, attempt to straddle two countries and two cultures has not come without criticism back in the US, where the hashtag #EileenGuTraitor has trended on social media during her events.
One of America’s most hyped action-sports prospects in recent memory, Gu’s decision to compete for China raised eyebrows when she changed affiliations in 2019. The issue has only grown thornier over the past two and a half years amid global condemnation for the host country’s human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in far western Xinjiang – which the US state department has labelled a genocide – in addition to the persecution of Tibetans and the repression of Hong Kong’s freedoms.
While she faced no questions on her ambiguous citizenship status during a press conference on Tuesday – unlike the half-dozen queries she adroitly elided after her big air triumph a week ago – Gu was asked whether she felt like she made a compromise by any of the state restrictions that come with doing business in China.
“I don’t really think of skiing as a business endeavour,” Gu said. “I guess it’s my job, but I also do it because I love it.
“I chose to ski for China because there’s this massive opportunity to spread the sport to people who haven’t even heard of it before. And honestly, I have met my goal. There are 300 million people on snow [in China], and to have even influenced a tiny fraction of that makes me immensely proud.”
She added: “I feel as though I use my voice as much as I can in topics that are relevant and personal to myself and targeted toward people who are willing to listen to me.
“That being said, I’m also a teenage girl. I do my best to make the world a better place. I’m having fun while doing it, I’m skiing, I’m hoping to inspire my girls and that’s my message right now.”
