Beijing Olympics spotlight: The pressure on face of the Games Eileen Gu is immense

Eileen Gu is already one of the most marketable sports people on the planet. At the age of 18, the freestyle skier and model is the best women’s halfpipe athlete in the world and she has already been on the cover of Vogue.

The extremely talented teenager is the face of the Beijing Olympics, but from the outside she is at the centre of a soft power grab by China, whether she likes it or not. Born and raised in the US, she has chosen to represent the land of her mother. No one can question how much that means to her, but it comes with controversy too. The good news is, she appears to have the mentality to shrug it off.

To give this some context, picture being an 18-year-old who switched allegiances from Team USA to China aged just 15, effectively defecting to a nation where tensions are high between both countries. Gu identifies as an American when she is in the US and Chinese when she is in China - but this is all with the backdrop of the Biden administration staging a diplomatic boycott of the Games due to concerns over human rights abuses. To be at the centre of those politics will be difficult to ignore.

But Gu has the innocence to shrug that off. People will have varying opinions about whether sport and politics mix, and therefore there will be a mix of views about whether the teenager should be talking about the issue and she has made the sensible decision to leave the talking to her skiing.

“I feel that I am competing in skiing to unite two nations, both of which are my home,” Gu told the South China Morning Post.

“I hope to break the divide between nations through passion and love.

“I’m fully American and look and speak the way I do. Nobody can deny I’m American. When I go to China, nobody can deny I’m Chinese because I’m fluent in the language and culture and completely identify as such.”

Gu is adored in China and she has a unique profile as an American-Chinese woman. Dual citizenship is not permitted by the state and it is unclear whether she has had to renounce her American citizenship, or whether she is an exception.

None of this is at all a slant on Gu’s own morals - she is the model of her age, passionate about her cultural makeup on all sides. She has already had to deal with abuse at a young age, when she switched international representation to China.

“My direct messages were absolutely flooded,” she recently told TIME.

“It’s hard to read through thousands of assumptions and just hateful things when you’re at such an impressionable stage of your life.

“It’s really easy to use sport as a form of unity and communication and friendship, because everybody is working toward a common goal.

“Because sport really is blind to race, gender, religion and nationality; it’s all just about pushing the human limit.”

Let’s focus on sport - the reason why Gu is such a talking point in the first place. A remarkable athlete, she is a two-time Youth Olympics gold medallist and a world champion in halfpipe and slopestyle.

Gu competed in six World Cup disciplines this season at four events and finished in the top two in all of them. She was unbeaten in her favoured halfpipe, won her only Big Air event and had a second place finish in slopestyle at Mammoth Mountain.

Endorsements keep on coming - Gu has deals with luxury brands like Louis Vuitton and Tiffany, and she is one of the hottest properties in the world right now.

The pressure will be on to turn her previous successes into Olympic gold, but the way Gu has handled everything so far, it looks like she will deliver.

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