Following her record-breaking performance and gold medal win at the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, Chinese athlete and freestyle skier Eileen Gu has become the centre of a digital firestorm. A bizarre rumour about her family and origin, dubbing the Olympian as 'lab-made', has swept throughout social media, shifting the global focus from her gravity-defying tricks to her DNA.
But behind the 'engineered' labels lie a deeply human narrative of a high-achieving matriarchy. From her mother's journey from Beijing to the Bay Area to her late grandmother's unwavering influence, here is the inside story of the women who raised her.
