The two best bets to win the gold medal in women’s halfpipe skiing at the Winter Olympics were born in the United States.
Zoe Atkin competes for Britain and hardly anyone raises a fuss about it.
Eileen Gu competes for China and never hears the end of it.
Stories of athletes who lived in one country then decided to compete for another are nothing new to international sports. Throw some Olympic rings on it, then add a high-profile athlete enjoying tremendous success the way Gu has, and it turns into someting messy, even political.
“So many athletes compete for a different country,” Gu said after Thursday night’s qualifying put her in the mix for her third medal of these Games. “People only have a problem with me doing it because they kind of lump China into this monolithic entity, and they just hate China. So it’s not really about what they think it’s about.”
She was responding to a question stemming from the latest comments that drew her into the headlines: U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance told Fox News earlier in the week he would hope someone who benefitted from growing up in the United States, the way Gu has, would want to compete under its flag.
None of this is new to the 22-year-old Bay Area native, who recognizes she absorbs her share of vitriol not just because she competes for her mother’s homeland, but also because of her success both on and off the snow.
Not long after the Olympics are over, Gu will be back in Milan attending a fashion show.
Before that, on Saturday, she will be going for her sixth Olympic medal and trying to make it 3 for 3 at two straight Games. That’s something no one else has done since the addition of big air to the program four years ago gave freestyle skiing a third head-over-heels event in the snowpark.
“Like, if I wasn’t doing well, I think that they probably wouldn’t care as much, and that’s OK for me,” she said.
After the Olympics, action sports stop caring about countries so much
Alyssa Liu, the American gold medalist in figure skating whose father is Chinese and settled in the Bay Area in his 20s, said her national team allegiance has “never been talked about” and she threw her support behind Gu.
“Eileen is doing amazing. I’ve actually known her since I was a kid,” Liu said. “So I’m rooting for her always.”
The Olympic charter says athletes must be a “national” — a word similar to citizen but with different legal connotations — of a country to compete for it. Athletes who are nationals of more than one country have to go through a “cooling-off” period if they want to switch, though neither Gu nor Atkin have changed over their Olympic careers.
It is not a surprise: Athletes in freeskiing and snowboarding — two lifestyle sports that champion individuality and are cultivated at X Games, Dew Tours and Burton U.S. Opens where nary a flag can be seen — spend most of their time traveling the globe caring very little about countries or anthems.
“We’re all going to the same place, all traveling together,” said Nick Goepper, the American three-time medalist who competes for his home country. “There’s 25 guys who do this at a high level across the world and it’s better to hang out and mingle with each other, just like people do.”
Besides Vance’s comments, a newspaper report about a 2025 document showing the Chinese government funded Gu and another of its athletes to the tune of millions drew headlines at these Olympics. Gu never mentions money when she discusses her reasons for choosing China, instead saying she did it to increase visibility and bring more girls into a sport that wasn’t as developed in China as it is in the United States.
“I’ve never received criticism from anybody in the ski industry about any of these decisions,” she said in an interview with The Associated Press last month. “But that’s because I’m friends with all of them.”
Atkin, from Massachusetts, made a choice that flew under the radar
Atkin has enjoyed plenty of success but faces none of the same issues. She is a Massachusetts native who has held dual citizenship since birth. (Gu’s citizenship status is another source of constant conjecture, though she has never revealed it.) Atkin’s father is British. Like Gu, Atkin attends Stanford.
The 23-year-old, who won last year’s world championship, has competed for Britain her entire career. She explained its smaller team has afforded her a chance to train and compete at a pace that works well for her.
“It also has a lot to do with my family and I guess I don’t really care what anybody else thinks,” she said. “Obviously, we compete for our nation, but at the end of the day, this is an individual sport and I’m trying to do my best show and my best skiing. To me, that’s all it’s really about.”
Somewhere between Gu and Atkin sits Gus Kenworthy — the halfpipe skier who got famous at the Olympics when he competed for the United States, then kept his career going by signing on with Britain.
He took some flak when he swtiched teams. One reason he did it was because of the perennial depth of the U.S. team. This year, the U.S. placed all four of its men in Friday night’s final and left two others with top-10 rankings — including two-time gold and one-time silver medalist David Wise — at home.
“You could be the fifth best person in America, ranked seventh in the world, and still not make the team,” said Kenworthy, who won the silver medal in 2014. “It’s great to have all these different countries represented. But sometimes it sucks to be in that position, and I’ve been in that position.”
That’s not the only math that changes when the action-sports world gets tossed into the deep end at the Olympics.
As Gu says frequently and said again Thursday, “people are entitled to their opinions.”
___
AP writer David Biller contributed.
