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Eileen Gu is a brilliant college student who moonlights as a cover model and can also pull off a right double cork 1620 before landing safely on the side of an Alp.
She speaks fluent English, fluent Mandarin, scored a 1560 on her SAT and made it through rush at Kappa Kappa Gamma. She’s passionate about quantum physics, yet is an international studies major at Stanford, although not this year because of the Winter Olympics, where on Monday she won her fifth career medal, a silver in freeski big air. She competes again in freeski halfpipe finals on Saturday.
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She is a sensation in China (where her mother was born) and a sensation — but also a cultural touchstone — in the United States (where she was born). She has made tens of millions off corporations in both countries desperate to be linked to her.
She’s 22 years old.
Not among those lucrative marketing deals is a certain beer company that might label her the most interesting woman in the world, which is a title even her fiercest critics might concede to her.
And she certainly has fierce critics.
That she competes for China — not the United States, where she was raised, resides, and until the 2018-19 season, was a member of the U.S. Ski & Snowboard team — has placed her in the middle of a ferocious firestorm, at least on social media.
The outrage ranges from those who hold honest and heartfelt patriotic opinions to typical culture-war profiteers.
The most extreme critics have labeled her a traitor, although that feels severe. She didn’t join a foreign army. She competes in a sport that very few Americans know exists other than for a couple of nights every four years on NBC.
To many others, she is a you-go-girl success story, a Gen Z force of nature, empowered in every way, including picking her team at the Olympics.
To be clear, Gu broke no rules by switching to China at age 15. Nation-choosing can be awkward, but it’s not uncommon. Team USA includes a bobsledder who previously competed in three Olympics for Canada as well as an ice dancing team originally born in Ukraine and Canada. In soccer, the United States men’s national team, like most national federations, actively recruits foreign-born, dual nationals to play for them.
The critics’ patriotism can’t be defined. It is a personal, often situational, sliding-scale emotion. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Rejection can still sting.
Gu has explained, repeatedly, that much of her decision to compete for China rested on the chance to serve as a role model to young Chinese girls, who lack the breadth of female stars that exist in the States.
“The U.S. already has the representation,” Gu told Time last month. “I like building my own pond.”
That’s nice, but it’s not a coincidence that the pond she constructed has some high-priced, shore-front property, including payments directly from a Chinese governmental agency.
In reality, Eileen Gu competes, first, foremost and perhaps exclusively, not for a country but for Eileen Gu. Like athletes who came before her, from Mark Spitz to Michael Phelps to the NBA Dream Team, Gu has exploited the Olympic Ideal for profits and power, the same way the International Olympic Committee, multinational corporations and politicians around the globe have for generations.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Gu and figure skater Zhu Yi, also American-born and competing for China after reportedly renouncing her U.S. citizenship, have been paid a combined $14 million over the past three years by the Beijing Municipal Sports Bureau. Then there is the unlocking of advertising and sponsorship money by becoming a hero in the massive Chinese market.
Forbes estimates Gu made $23.1 million in 2025 alone, fourth most among all athletes who are women globally.
With her combination of talent, tenacity and Vogue covers, she certainly wouldn’t be filling out a FAFSA app to cover tuition if she waved the red, white and blue, but this is a massive number. By comparison, Caitlin Clark made an estimated $12.1 million last year, according to Forbes.
Back when Gu was 15 and being raised by a single mother in San Francisco, nothing like this was assured.
So as sellouts go, this was a profitable one.
To focus solely on finger-pointing and flag-waving is to miss the greater story here, a riddle wrapped in a mystery on a pair of skis.
Patriotism for pay is suspicious from the start. And Gu, with her ever-present smile, seemingly constant camera awareness and smart-yet-smooth answers, can invite questions of insincerity.
When Gu unfurls a Chinese flag after a race, is she proud of the country or the paycheck?
She has deftly handled questions from both sides of the Pacific about her decision. Some wonder how this is even possible, since China doesn’t offer dual citizenship and, to our knowledge, Gu has never renounced U.S. citizenship. She has never appeared on a quarterly IRS publication of “Individuals, Who Have Chosen To Expatriate.”
In America, there is particular anger that she repeatedly avoids saying much of anything about human rights abuses in China. The hypocrisy is real, although a segment of the same critics generally implore American athletes to “stick to sports,” at least when an expressed opinion doesn’t align with theirs.
Then again, is she really some kind of help to the Chinese Communist Party? Is it good for them that millions of their young idolize a highly educated, westernized, cut-throat capitalist businesswoman who urges kids to not wait until they grow up to be the change they want to see?
Who knows, maybe she’s an American plant.
Besides, is she really harming the United States if she, a one-person corporation, is drawing tens of millions out of China only to presumably invest it back into America, where she lives? Where on the patriotism scale does that rank compared to a U.S.-based multinational that might sponsor Team USA while offshoring jobs? Any number of American companies, including ESPN’s parent Disney, do plenty of business in China.
Isn’t being a rank-opportunist and playing everyone in all directions for more and more money, like it or not, the American Way?
Yes, having a citizenry that truly loves America and would never consider any alternative is an ideal for many. Then again, if you got offered $23.1 million to work for a Chinese company …
Gu is way too intelligent not to have opinions and explanations for all of this, and perhaps one day she will offer a full accounting. Right now, she’s left both sides of the Pacific searching for the truth, trying to crack this enigma.
“What I really love about quantum physics,” Gu told Olympics.com, “[is] it’s very conceptual and makes you question the nature of reality.”
Was she talking about how her studies help push her athletically into more twists and turns, or was she playfully trolling dueling superpowers whose obsession over her has provided generational wealth and global fame?
Eileen Gu seems like a funhouse mirror that takes peoples’ projections and reflects them right back, all while soaring higher and higher into the air, an unbothered college kid cooly sailing above the fray.
Go ahead and call her nearly every name in the book. You might even be right.
Just know that with money and medals to count, with photo shoots and sorority formals and physics finals to come, she is unlikely to call you back.
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