On Thursday, a certain freestyle skier will clip her boots on and huck herself down the halfpipe in Livigno, to the feverish anticipation of fans in two countries. Though she was born in the United States and attends Stanford University, she represents and wins medals under the banner of a different nation at the Olympics. She has yet to win a gold medal at the 2026 Games, though halfpipe is her best event, and therefore the one that will draw the most scrutiny. That's right: It's almost Zoe Atkin's time.
Atkin, a 23-year-old Massachusetts native representing her father's native Great Britain, probably is not the freestyle skier you were thinking of, if you were thinking of one at all, and is certainly not the most famous person to whom those descriptors apply. That would be Eileen Gu, the 22-year-old San Francisco native competing in her second Olympics for China. Much like the first time around, she is racking up medals; much like the first time around, she is also being called a traitor by cogs in the American nationalist apparatus like the Free Press, Enes Kanter Freedom (misidentified as an NBA "star" in many write-ups), and, most notably of all, U.S. vice president JD Vance.
"I certainly think that somebody who grew up in the United States of America, who benefited from our education system, from the freedoms and liberties that make this country a great place, I would hope that they want to compete with the United States of America," Vance told Fox News. "So, I'm going to root for American athletes, and I think part of that is people who identify themselves as Americans. That's who I’m rooting for this Olympics."
While there is nothing new here, I do find the insistence on refighting an identical culture skirmish four years later to be telling, both of the exhaustedness of the critique itself and of the grounds on which the critique is being launched. If the gripe was with Gu's choice not to represent the U.S., then Atkin and the many other athletes in her position would also be in line to get yelled at. None of them are as talented as Gu—though Atkin is a legit gold-medal contender—but more importantly, none of them are as famous. Really what Vance and his ilk are mad about isn't that Gu is winning medals for China, it's that she is maximizing her fame and earning potential by winning medals for China. They are mad that she doesn't need them.
Gu is the highest-paid athlete at these Winter Games, raking in some $23 million, mostly in endorsements for Porsche, Victoria's Secret, Anta, Red Bull, TCL Electronics, and IWC Watches, among others. She is also the most decorated freestyle skier in history. Freestyle skiing, like most Olympic sports, doesn't pay that well, which puts Gu in a somewhat unusual position: Success in the much more demanding and competitive (not to mention quadrennial) framework of Olympic skiing is a mere precursor to the relatively chiller and far more lucrative work of modeling and brand ambassadorship. The only contradiction here, as Laura Wagner notes in her totally definitive story on the subject from Feb. 2022, is in Gu's insistence that there is some larger sense of mission animating her work.
Here's another narrative: Eileen Gu is above all else a rugged individualist who enjoys massive privilege but chafes at any mention of it, while nonetheless championing the belief that all it takes to achieve one's dream is hard work. Sound familiar? It's a funny thing: The athlete at the Winter Olympics doing the most to spread the true message of America is the supposed traitor competing for China.
Wagner wrote that four years ago, when a largely blinkered American press corps had spent the Beijing Olympics wringing its hands about Gu: wondering whether her choice to represent China symbolized the dawn of the Chinese century, gazing in wonder at the force of marketing that Gu has become, or tut-tutting at her for legitimating China's—rather than the U.S.'s—spotty human rights record. A lot has changed in four years, though not really where Gu is concerned. She spent some time at Stanford, won X-Games gold, signed bigger modeling contracts, represented bigger brands, then roared into Milan-Cortina and won silver medals in both slopestyle and big air, a discipline she hadn't competed in since Beijing.
In the meantime, the U.S. reelected Donald Trump, the tenets of consensus reality frayed further, and the U.S.'s aforementioned human rights record took on the blights of an internal war on its own people and full-throated support for a genocide in Palestine. The newly brutish and deeply stupid social reality is typified by Elon Musk buying Twitter and cranking the racism dials, and the Ellison family installing a cynical Zionist dumb-dumb to run CBS News. The Oreo-dot-com-slash-pride webpage that Wagner linked to in 2022 now redirects to Oreo-dot-com-slash-bringing-dash-families-dash-together (military families, to be specific). Vance is a politician for these stupid times, someone who fully conceives of the purpose of his office as a prism through which to amplify and direct cultural grievance, even if its subject is his own family.
The reasons why Vance would go after Gu are pretty obvious. She makes for a convenient and highly visible symbol of an enemy within, a nefarious body of Americans-in-name-only who harbor secret loyalties to the nation's enemies. The cynicism of that claim is just as obvious as its motivation, for one because everyone already had to endure this media cycle four years ago and also because Gu is in every other part of her life an exemplar of America's values. If this is Vance and Co.'s idea of a traitor, they are splitting a vanishingly small distinction in hopes that the ambient bigotry of their audience will be strong enough to overcome the strained nature of the critique.
To split another distinction: The real reason why people like Vance are mad at Gu has nothing to do with the symbolic heft of winning medals for China instead of the U.S., it's that even the most cynical read of Gu as a shrewd mercenary businesswoman is incredibly damning of the American chauvinist position. If she chose to represent China because doing so was potentially more lucrative, she has been proven right. They're angry that it's true, and at being made to know it.
