This story was originally published on April 11, 2022. It was included in a year-end list of SI’s best stories of 2022.
Competitive sports are built on the concept of fair play, which helps explain why so many oppressive regimes see value in games. Any form of good, wholesome fun can seem like it is presented by good, wholesome people, even when the facts say otherwise.
China, with its appalling human rights record and opposition to an independent Taiwan, hosted the recent Winter Olympics with the strategically peaceful slogan Together for a Shared Future. One of the stars of those Games was Eileen Gu, a California-born skier who chose to compete for her mother's homeland of China, implicitly embracing the government of China rather than the U.S., whether or not that was her intent. Gu declined to say whether she renounced her U.S. citizenship to gain a Chinese passport, as Chinese law requires, but she did gush about “the ability of sport to bridge the gap and to be a force for unity.”
