{调取该文章的TAG关键词}|Go Gu Go, the Proud Teenage Girl( 二 )
Born to a Chinese mother and an American father, Gu showed keen interest in ski from a very young age. As a little girl, she spent one month or two each year in Beijing, the birthplace of her mother, while studying full time and training over the weekends in California. In 2019, she decided to compete under the Chinese flag months after earning her first World Cup gold in Italy.
“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.”
Under the banner with Gu’s beaming smile, 364 million people participated in the winter sports as of October 2021. China’s ski resorts surged to nearly 1,000 in 2022 from 770 in 2019, according to the statistics from the National Bureau of Sports.
Gu recalled the fast rise of the winter sport in China. “When I first skied in China, there was a very small circle of skiers. There were less than 100 free-style skiers in the whole China. It seemed everyone who did freestyle skiing knew everyone else. Now the circle has grown exponentially,” she told a reporter from 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 way of relaxation and know ourselves, others, the world culture and feel the nature,” she said.
“I am an 18-year-old girl. I am here to live my best life,” she said, referring to her debut in the Olympics. “I am doing my best. I am enjoying the entire process.” The intrepid and cheerful teenager totally ignored the controversy.
Actually China is not the first host of the Olympics to recruit foreign athletes. At Pyeongchang 2018, the Korean ice hockey team hired 11 naturalized players from Canada and America. In that sense, Gu is not an exception as a flexible nationality of Olympic athletes has become common practice today. After all, the spirit of the international sport feast is to overcome division and embrace unity.
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 Bloemen has never faced the same outcry in his country of birth – the Netherlands.
Meanwhile, China is also an exporter of athletes. At the Tokyo Olympics last year, five of the top 10 women table tennis players were born in China, but only two of them represented China.
Championing Women’ Rights About her improvised rotation in air, Gu said: “Even if I didn't land it, I felt it would send a message out to the world and hopefully encourage more girls to break their own boundaries.”
“Being a young person, everybody is just figuring out who they are,” the extreme sport athlete said in an interactive essay to the New York Times. She said feeling and overcoming fear is the major source of her excitement. “I am a kind of person who is addicted to adrenaline. Feeling that rush and that reward…the uncertainty is addicting,” she said in the essay.
“In our world today, men are significantly more likely to participate or find careers in sports than women. Many people claimed that it was just because men’s muscles were naturally larger and stronger than that of women. So over time stereotypes developed to negatively define female athletes,” the freeskier told her class in a speech. At the age of 12, she was determined to change the status quo and fight for gender equality.
Gu, who hopes to win two more gold medals in halfpipe and slopestyle, now the darling of the entire nation. Everyone from all walks of life is talking about her, online and offline. Her grandma’s former employer-the Chinese Ministry of Transportation - sent a congratulatory letter to the 86-year-old retiree. Everyone is showering her, her mom and her grandma with praises.
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