When sports fans hear the name Eileen Gu in the next 12 months – and will hear it a lot – it won’t be by chance.
Hard work, laser-focused planning, a supernatural wealth of talent and a splendid moment of opportunity can turn this 17-year-old freeskier, who was born in San Francisco but whose mother is Chinese, into the most recognizable adventurer in the world of sports action.
She excelled this weekend to become twice the champion of the winter X-Games – once in the halfpipe on Friday, and again on the slopestyle track on Saturday. These victories put Gu directly on the short list of gold medal candidates at the Beijing Olympics next February.
Wins there could be nothing less than a transformer for snow sports in China. Although Gu grew up in the United States and skied most of her childhood on the American team, she will compete for the home team at the Beijing Olympics. It was a difficult decision, made less difficult because of the untapped public in that country. When China applied to host the Olympics, it set a goal to put 300 million people on the snow in a 1.4 billion country.
Gu, who speaks Mandarin fluently and makes annual trips to China with his mother, Yan, thinks he could do his part to bring some girls out for a walk.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE SPORTS COVERAGE ON FOXNEWS.COM
“Some people retire with 10 gold medals and then are 30 years old and don’t know what to do,” she said. “But I want to be able to have these medals and feel that I have changed someone’s life or changed the sport or introduced the sport to a country where it was not before.”
It’s an audacious conversation for a teenager who’s been doing it at the highest level for just over two years and who was making her X Games debut this year. She also won bronze in the air on Friday night and will leave Aspen as the first woman to win three medals at the X Games as a rookie.
But for most of her 17 years, Gu has been thinking big – and succeeding in almost everything she has tried.
Her parallel job is to be a model. Becoming a regular presence during fashion weeks in Paris and New York, she has already scrolled through the pages of Chinese versions of Vogue, Harper’s and Elle, and has more high-profile photo sessions set for later this year with American magazines. “I love the sound of camera shutters,” she said.
She is a talented pianist – you can find some of that on YouTube – an avid runner who headlined her high school team’s second place in state championships. She graduated from rigorous San Francisco University High School in three years and is enrolled at Stanford, where she will start in 2022.
“And,” she says, “I like to go out with my friends, because I’m a teenager, and that’s also important.”
She says she was able to bring some semblance of normality to her successful childhood because she grew up in San Francisco, a non-ski mecca. She would be invited to parties over the weekend and apologize to friends, but she would go skiing.
“They would basically be, ‘Skiing, OK, whatever,'” she said. “I think a lot of them still think I’m a ski runner, not a freestyle.”
It was the horror of mother Yan to see her daughter, then 8 years old, straight down the slopes during one of her frequent trips to the Northstar ski resort that encouraged her to find something different, and perhaps less dangerous, for Eileen.
Eileen says that her mother didn’t really know what “freestyle” was, or that high heels over the halfpipe and slopestyle kickers could be as tricky as pulling straight off the ski slopes. But Yan signed up Eileen, and so began a journey that looks set to make a decisive stop in the mountains above Beijing next February.
It was in those early days that Gu faced what any talented girl encounters when entering a kingdom dominated by boys.
“It was only when I was 14 that I had skier friends of my level,” she said. “So I was constantly thinking, ‘Do I have to prove myself? I’m the only girl here. Do I have to do a bigger trick? Do I have to make myself look better so people don’t laugh at women’s skiing?'”
Regarding another thorny issue, Gu says he is not naive about part of the hatred he receives in his growing social media accounts for choosing China over the United States for his skiing career. She is well aware of how much more volume detractors can command as their story approaches the Olympic flame.
“‘Difficult’ is the wrong word, but it weighed heavily,” said his agent, Tom Yaps, who spoke about the early recognition of Gu by the United States team as someone with great talent who would need a lot of representation. “At the end of the day, she really feels she can make an impact on the lives of these young women. She looked around and said, ‘There are already so many brilliant models in the United States’, and she felt that her voice could really make an impact there. “
Gu, who looks like an athlete twice his age, seems to understand the weight of what he’s doing. It was her narrating in an Adidas ad about women’s empowerment, reading a seventh-grade essay she wrote on the United States Title IX law, which was written to protect women from discrimination in college sports. Recently, said Yaps, Gu was asked to record a video for an upcoming diplomacy summit on how to improve China-US relations.
“Things like that are literally the reason she is doing this,” said Yaps.
Gu tells the story of her sixth year art project, when she made a bag with tape with the slogan “Celebrate Sarah” engraved on the side – in honor of the late Sarah Burke, who paved the way for women in freestyle skiing and it was instrumental in putting the event on the Olympic program.
“I was terrible at art,” said Gu. “But I did a little history class. I was practically a 12 year old boy complaining about a woman in a sport that nobody did. But in the end, people said it was really inspiring. I got an ‘A’ from my wallet. “
The stakes are higher now.
Asked what she wanted her message to be as she embarked on a turbulent year that would take her to a mountain in her other country, Gu said she would love to see more girls in China thinking about opportunities they didn’t know existed. She would like to see a lot more people like her on the mountain – maybe one or two of them pushing her for a gold medal someday.
“The change is made from the bottom up,” she said. “We were all little girls surrounded for the first time by people we were afraid of at first. But I just want to see more people out there.”