Eileen Gu Is The Poster Child For The Post-Nationalist Olympics

Part of what has always made the Olympics riveting is the nationalist component embedded in it—countries competing against countries, pitting their best athletes against each other in what often feels like a proxy for war. This was especially true during the Cold War, when the Olympic medal counts of America and the Soviet Union would far outpace all other countries, and athletic prowess was an obvious stand-in for military prowess.

Most of that is gone now, and instead of athletes truly representing their home countries we have the sorry spectacle of athletes representing themselves and their “fans”—influencer-Olympians, ambassadors not of nations but of brands.

Something about this year’s Winter Olympics in Italy is actively post-nationalist. We of course hear athletes talk about being part of an “Olympic family,” or invoke gauzy notions of unity and coming together for the sake of sport. But these platitudes mask a deeper shift away from national loyalty and national identity at the Olympics.

Witness the cadre of American athletes who, invited by the international press to denounce Trump and criticize his administration’s immigration policies, have been only too happy to oblige. So many U.S. Olympians have done so that it’s become a major theme of these games. Newsweek even compiled a list of U.S. Olympians criticizing Trump so we could keep track of them all.

Their criticisms of Trump come with ritual equivocations about representing the United States at all. Hunter Hess, the 27-year-old freestyle skier from Bend, Oregon, said he had “mixed emotions” about wearing the American flag, and that he was really just there to compete for his friends, family, and supporters. Trump subsequently called Hess a “real Loser,” who “shouldn’t have tried out for the Team,” prompting another round of Trump criticism from American athletes.

The drift towards post-nationalism at the Olympics has been steadily growing since the end of the Cold War, but in these Milan Games it’s taken on a new dimension in the singular person of Eileen Gu. The daughter of a Chinese mother and an American father, the 22-year-old Gu hails from San Francisco and is currently a student at Stanford. Yet she’s been competing as a freestyle skier for China since 2019, when she was only 15.

At the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, Gu won two gold medals and a silver for China. She’s already won a silver medal this time around and will likely keep medaling.

Gu of course isn’t the first American athlete to defect to China, but she’s certainly the most prominent—and likely the most wealthy. According to Forbes, Gu is the fourth highest-paid female athlete in the world, in just a few years amassing a fortune worth some $23 million. Of that, only about $100,000 comes from skiing, and the rest from lucrative modeling contracts and major brand endorsements, many in China where Gu is a superstar.

This makes Gu an ideal ambassador and propagandist for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In that role, she has dutifully avoided answering even the most basic questions about her citizenship. To compete for China in the Olympics, Gu must have a Chinese passport, and since China doesn’t allow dual citizenship there has been speculation for years that she renounced her American citizenship.

Gu, who speaks Mandarin and spent time in China throughout her life, maintains a carefully cultivated public persona and refuses to engage any questions about her citizenship or her absentee American father, whose name isn’t public. She carefully redirects any politically tinged questions, adopts woke positions on most issues she does speak about, and reliably parrots CCP talking points about how wonderful and open China is.

Gu speaks Mandarin and has spent time in China her entire life, yet she lives, trains, and goes to school in America. She lives in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in San Francisco (Sea Cliff), attended the private prep school University High School (tuition $68,090), and has enjoyed all the benefits of a posh upbringing in the United States. Yet Gu competes for China on the world stage, and has enriched herself immensely from it.

This makes her a traitor, more or less. Or at the very least a defector—and a useful one. American news outlets are covering her like they did in the last one—hyping her up as if she’s an American athlete, not a Chinese one.

The New York Times asked her along with all the other Americans about Trump’s riposte to Hess. She said exactly what you might expect: that she was disappointed the attention was on Trump’s comments and not the unifying spirit of the Olympics. “I’m sorry that the headline that is eclipsing the Olympics has to be something so…”—and here the Times reports that Gu paused to choose her next word carefully—“unrelated to the spirit of the Games. It really runs contrary to everything the Olympics should be.”

No reporter has yet asked Gu how she feels about representing China in light of the news this week that Jimmy Lai was handed a 20-year prison sentence in Hong Kong for the crime of practicing journalism. Lai is 78 and will die in a Chinese communist prison. Gu did, however, eagerly answer questions about her custom China-themed ski suit that she designed.

As Amber Duke wrote for The Spectator during the 2022 Winter Olympics, “Gu is undeniably talented, but spending too much time on her accolades serves the CCP’s efforts to glamorize the regime and paper over its abuses. Some media figures have even suggested that criticism of Gu is driven by racism; China notably used similar rhetoric in response to its cover-up of the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.”

Duke also writes that during the Beijing Olympics Gu was a useful prop in the CCP’s rather transparent propaganda blitz about Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai, who had disappeared in late 2021 after accusing a top CCP official of sexually assaulting her multiple times three years earlier. Shuai reappeared months later at the Beijing Games, and in a tightly run interview with French sports newspaper L’Equipe, recanted her sexual accusations. “The next day,” wrote Duke, “Shuai was photographed with the president of the IOC watching Gu compete in the Big Air event.”

Whatever the Olympic Games should be about, or used to be about, it’s increasingly obvious they’re no longer about national pride or representing one’s country—at least not for a bunch of anti-Trump American Olympians. And certainly not for Eileen Gu.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.