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{调取该文章的TAG关键词}|Eileen Gu Should Not be Lightening Rod for Geopolitics

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.
To Switch Teams is Nothing but Common 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.

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