“I hope the pursuit of extreme sports can be a means through which people in China and the United States can enhance their communication, understanding and friendship…Beijing I am coming!” Less than an hour later, she wrote again, deploying a verb used for soldiers called up for duty. “I am proud to represent China in the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics,” she wrote. “When I’m in China, I’m Chinese.” But the 15-year-old now felt that she had to choose between her two identities, and between two countries locked in a trade war and an ideological struggle.įinally, on June 6th 2019, Gu posted an announcement on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter. “When I’m in the US, I’m American,” she has said. Gu had always lived happily on the hyphen. It was, in part, a question of identity for the American girl raised in San Francisco by two strong Chinese women, her mother and grandmother, in the absence of her American father. Over the next four months, as her classmates fretted over sophomore prom and physics tests, Gu agonised about which superpower to represent in the 2022 Olympics. It was almost as if she wasn’t fully prepared for this invitation – or the decision she faced. Whereas the Chinese athletes all wore trainers, Gu’s heavy winter boots peeked out from under her uniform. Gu’s hair made her stand out, as did her footwear. It was a typical group photo except that front and centre, two over from Xi, was one of America’s top skiers. After the speech, Xi posed with the athletes under a Chinese flag. But there, among the dozens of state-media photographs of Xi’s visit that day, Eileen Gu appeared, standing next to one of the most powerful men on Earth. Nor does it appear in any of the detailed reports and documentaries that Chinese media and Western sponsors have made about her life. Their success, he said, was vital to “the nation’s great rejuvenation”. “This is a once-in-a-century opportunity,” Xi told them. Among the assembled athletes at the national winter-sports training centre, Gu stood in the front row, just a few feet from Xi, listening intently as he urged them to win honour for the motherland when it hosted its first Winter Olympics. The American teenager was now wearing a red-and-white Team China uniform, her bleached-blonde hair falling over the red five-star flag stitched on its front. On February 1st 2019, less than a week after singing the “Star-Spangled Banner”, Gu reappeared in Beijing at an audience with Xi Jinping, China’s leader. The newly crowned world number-one freestyle skier was going below the radar for a few days because she had a very special meeting to attend. Nor was it, as Gu wrote cryptically six days later on Instagram, “a quick #hongkong pit stop before going home (finally)”.
It was hardly the fastest route back to high school in San Francisco.
Gu spends part of every summer in Beijing, but this detour was unusual. As most of her American teammates raced home for the World Championships in Utah, Gu and her mother, Gu Yan, flew off in the opposite direction – to China.
#Enter the warriors gate racost free
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.” And she sang: “O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave. On the podium, sporting her first World Cup gold medal, Gu placed her hand over her heart as the American national anthem began to play. After her final jump – two and a half turns in mid-air to a perfect backward landing – the pixels on the leaderboard rearranged and Gu’s name suddenly appeared in first place, next to the American flag. In a blur of black and red, Gu sped down the slope. In fourth place behind two American teammates, the 15-year-old California schoolgirl needed a dazzling finish to move closer to the goal she’d promised herself – and her mother – since she was a nine-year-old daredevil: competing in the 2022 Winter Olympics, now slated to take place in her mother’s birthplace, Beijing. It was January 2019, and the newest and youngest member of the US freestyle ski team stared down the Italian mountain course that had foiled her on her first two runs in the World Cup final.
0 kommentar(er)
