Eileen Gu Should Not be Lightening Rod for Geopolitics

The 18-year-old freeski athlete is savouring her overwhelming triumph on the podium in the 2012 Beijing Olympic Games.

BEIJING, February 15 (TMTPOST) -- No young athlete has ever been so widely and wildly loved in China. The image of her dazzling smile is everywhere: the shopping mall, the elevator, the bus stop, the subway station and the gas station. She is semi-officially the public face of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games.

Eileen Gu, a daredevil 18-year-old, deserves all this. She secured a gold medal in the women’s freeski big air event after completing a notoriously difficult trick, which she had never attempted to do during her training, despite her mom’s advice to take a defensive approach. Neither had she tried it out on the ski slope nor on a trampoline. It was a gamble.

And she made it! The jaw-dropping stunt took the breath of the Chinese audience.

Gu had already been a darling for big corporations in China even before the Beijing Winter Olympics. She, born to an American father and a Chinese mother, had endorsement deals with about 10 Chinese and global corporations. Just to name a few. Diary behemoth Mengniu, sports shoes maker Anta, energy beverage maker Red Bull and snowboard company Faction Skis among many others.

At the age of 15, Gu won her first World Cup gold in Italy. She was a skiing prodigy and first hit the slope at the age of three in a skiing resort in California where her mom was a part-time coach. On June 7, 2019, she announced her decision to compete under the national flag of China during the Beijing Winter Olympics. Her affiliation with Team China did not cause much controversy until February 7, when she won a gold for China.

In the press conference after her win, Western reporters bombarded her with questions about her nationality. She did not answer it directly but said “I am American in America and Chinese in China.” Some media outlet says she is “straddling on a slippery slope at high altitude with little error for mistake.”

But culturally she is both since she was born to a Chinese mother and an American father. She grew up in both America and China under the guidance of her Chinese mom and grandma. She speaks fluent Chinese. She is a self-styled Beijing girl. “This was an increasingly tough decision for me to make,” she wrote in an Instagram post about competing for China. “I am proud of my heritage, and equally proud of my American upbringings.”

About her nationality, it is up to the International Olympic Committee to determine whether she qualifies for competing for China.

In today’s highly polarized political cliate in the United States, Gu’s eloquence and frankness in explaining her stance quickly drew harsh criticisms from the rightwing media, particularly Fox News. TV host Will Cain labelled her as an “ungrateful traitor” to the country of her birth on the grounds of the change in sporting allegiance. Cain said it was “shameful” for the young skier not to represent the United States, which groomed her into a world-class athlete. He argued that Gu rejected America in exchange for big money in China.

A former U.S. winter X Games gold medalist also expressed her reproach of Gu. “Eileen is from California, not from China, and her decision [to compete for China] seems opportunistic,” Jen Hudak told The New York Post. “She became the athlete she is because she grew up in the United States, where she had access to premier training grounds and coaching that, as a female, she might not have had in China.”

Even the New York Times criticized her for being privileged without knowing it.

Gu is neither the first nor the last to switch sporting allegiance. Actually it is a common practice in the international sporting arena. At Pyeongchang 2018, Korea’s national ice hockey team hired 11 naturalized players from Canada and America. Canadian speed skater Ted-Jan Bloemen was born in the Netherlands and used to represent the European nation. Bloemen moved to Canada in 2014 and won gold and silver medals for Canada in Pyeongchang, beating Dutch skaters. But the Dutch Canadian has never faced the same outcry in his country of birth – the Netherlands.

Above all, the spirit of the international sporting competition is to overcome division and embrace solidarity. Apart from recruiting athletes from overseas, China is also an exporter of athletes. At the Tokyo Summer Olympics last year, five of the top 10 women table tennis players were born in China, but only two of them represented China.

The Fox News host’s criticism of Gu is bigoted at best and racist at worst. During the coronavirus pandemic, some haters told Asians to go back to their home country. Now Gu is representing her mom’s home country and they are lambasting her for that.

Gu was not hesitant to hit back. She described those who attacked her as either “uneducated” or lacking “empathy to empathize with a good heart.” She may be blunt but she said the truth. Based on public information, she did not use U.S. taxpayers’ money for her training. She went to a private school. Her mother and grandmother invested heavily in terms of money and time and nurtured her in her formative years.

Her primary motivation to compete for China was to encourage girls and women to enjoy snow and ice sports in China. Not many Chinese participated in winter sports. Only a small fraction of people residing in northeastern China practiced skating and few did skiing. “When I first skied in China, there was a very small circle of skiers. There were less than 100 freestyle skiers in the whole country. It seemed everyone who did freestyle skiing knew everyone else. Now the circle has grown exponentially,” she told a reporter of a Chinese website.

“I grew up together with China’s skiing sport. To promote the sport in China and encourage more young people to love the sport is one of my main goals in life… I want to share my passions for skiing with them. I wish many people would enjoy skiing and see it as a way of relaxation and knowing ourselves, others, the world culture and feeling the nature,” she said.  

“I have decided to compete for China in the 2022 Winter Olympics,” Gu announced in a 2019 tweet. “The opportunity to help inspire millions of young people where my mom was born, during the 2022 Beijing Olympic Winter Games is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help promote the sport I love.”

There are a thousand Hamlets in the eyes of a thousand people. Gu is a darling in the eyes of millions of different Chinese people.

Young people like her because of her approach to sports – “have fun” and “enjoy it” -- as she repeatedly told the audience. She has many hobbies, including but not limited to cross-country running, football, basketball and horse-riding. In the past, the term athlete in China was often linked to endurance and even sufferings. She has redefined the term singlehandedly. She is an emerging generation of athletes in China: bold, frank and eloquent.

Middle-class parents like her because they identify with her mom’s parenting style. Gu attended the summer mathematics school in Beijing, which resonates with tons of middle-class parents. Her mom said: “Ten days of extracurricular learning in Beijing equals a year of schooling in the United States.”

Gu has cashed in on her popularity. Riding the wave of her surging popularity in China, Gu has become the second most wealthy athlete only after legendary basketball player Yao Ming. Gu’s commercial value may go even higher if she collects more medals at the 2022 Winter Olympics.

If that is her secondary motivation to compete for that, then there is nothing wrong with making money at any corner of the world as long as it is legal. As China’s former statesman Deng Xiaoping put it, to get rich is glorious. Deng’s maxim lifted China out of absolute poverty after the country had been stuck in a class struggle for decades. Gu does not break any law either in America or China.

Demagogue Cain should stop blaming the teenage athlete. She has the very right to choose which team she wants to ski for as long as the International Olympic Committee approves it. She should not fall prey to mounting China-U.S. political and trade tensions.

As Jesus said, "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar"s; and unto God the things that are God"s". It is a cliché but it stays relevant in todays’ world. Stop uttering words of politically driven hatred and enjoy the game.

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