Eileen Gu Wins Gold in Big Air Freestyle Skiing

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• Feb. 7, 2022

BEIJING — Eileen Gu, the 18-year-old from California, won the gold in the big air freestyle event Tuesday while competing for China in the Winter Olympics, a hard fought and close competition that left her biggest competitor, Tess Ledeux of France, in tears over taking home the silver.

Gu’s odyssey began on a blue-sky Tuesday morning at Shougang Park, on a massive modern jump set in an industrial park. Under the glare of a bright sun and the eyes of international media, she opened her performance with a “right double 1440 safety,” scoring 93.75 and vaulting her into first place. Her lead didn’t last long.

Three skiers later, Ledeux landed a 1620 — an extra half rotation from what Gu performed — to earn a score of 94.5. Gu and Ledeux traded big tricks in the second round. Gu headed to her last jump needing at least 93 points to leap from third to first.

Her final trick, called a left double 1620 with a safety grab, scored 94.5 points and landed Gu a gold medal. Among those who cheered the result was Gu’s mother, Yan Gu, on a balcony with friends near the landing area.

When Ledeux, disappointed with her second-place finish, fell to the ground, Gu tried to comfort her. In the big air final, athletes get three jumps, each judged on a 100-point scale. The best two scores are added together to determine an athlete’s final score.

Gu has two more freestyle skiing events, slopestyle and halfpipe, and will be a favorite to win both. As with big air, she had not finished lower than second place in any of those events at major competitions over the past year.

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Born and raised in California but competing for China, Gu has attracted international attention — and some debate — for her decision in 2019 to represent her mother’s homeland.

Yan Gu, Eileen’s mother, was born in Shanghai and raised in Beijing. She emigrated to the United States about 30 years ago for postgraduate studies and settled in San Francisco.

Eileen Gu, a rising teenage star for the United States, has become a dominant freestyle skier and a budding supermodel. Her face is ubiquitous in China, in the advertisements for the many companies she represents and in the glowing news coverage she receives from state media.

Gu has said that she wants to be a bridge between the United States and China while inspiring young women and helping China’s nascent winter-sports industry to grow. She and her mother have declined to discuss any of the thorny geopolitical issues that involve the rival countries.

The setting for big air is garnering its share of attention, too. While all other freestyle skiing and snowboarding events are being held near mountainous Zhangjiakou, about 120 miles northwest of Beijing, Olympic organizers opted to turn the big air competition into a city affair.

Shougang Park is a converted steelworks on the western edge of Beijing. It features a swooshing ski jump — like a “J” leaning back — set near concrete cooling towers that some have suggested resemble the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant from “The Simpsons.”

The urban location brought more than a few fans during an Olympics held mostly before empty seats. Most of them, like the lenses of television cameras and dozens of photographers, were aimed at Gu.

China sees Gu as a way to build its winter-sports industry. The country is hardly a Winter Olympics powerhouse; at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games, it won one gold medal.

The hope was that Gu might triple that total all by herself.