Bay Area-born freestyle skier Eileen Gu crashed the Chinese internet after winning gold for China on her debut at the Beijing Winter Olympics, the …
Bay Area-born freestyle skier Eileen Gu crashed the Chinese internet after winning gold for China on her debut at the Beijing Winter Olympics, the first of three she hopes to claim on behalf of her mother’s home country. “The future is bright” for Gu and her teammates, read a Feb.8 letter from China’s Winter Sports Administrative Center, congratulating them for claiming China’s first gold on snow. “Score greater glory for the Party and the people,” the letter urged the team. On China’s Twitter-like Sina Weibo, the outpouring of adulation from Chinese fans for the 18-year-old champion temporarily overloaded the site. “Dad with Harvard, mom with Peking University and Stanford, grandmother an athlete, she herself beautiful and stylish,” said one post that got shared 115,000 times. The reception to Gu sharply contrasts with the intense scrutiny felt by Zhu Yi, the figure skater who gave up her American citizenship in 2018 and changed her name from Beverly to Yi to compete for China. Only one year older than Gu and also born in California, Zhu was mocked on Chinese social media for crying after falling in her performance two days in a row, knocking the Chinese team from third place to fifth in the team event. “Stop crying, I want to cry too,” wrote a Chinese Weibo user, with some others deriding her spoken Chinese and telling her to “go back to America.” Gu and Zhu are among dozens of athletes born and raised in North America that Beijing has enlisted to bolster its Olympic success across the field, including in sports it has not historically been strong in. But the reception the pair has received shows that the Chinese public could be unforgiving if an adopted athlete’s performance fails to live up to expectations. The recruitment drive was perhaps most notable in the ice hockey team, where 28 out of 48 men and women players are foreign-born with six having no Chinese heritage at all.
