Eileen Gu

Eileen Gu was born and raised in San Francisco, and she skis for China. That single choice made her the most commercially valuable athlete in winter sport, and a symbol in the rivalry between the United States and China.

On the snow, she is the most decorated freeskier in Olympic history: six medals in six events. Two golds and a silver at Beijing 2022, then halfpipe gold and two silvers at Milano Cortina 2026.

Off the snow, Forbes put her 2025 earnings at $23.1 million, fourth among all female athletes and the only one in the top ten outside tennis and golf. Less than 1% of that came from prize money.

On 7 June 2019, aged 15, Gu announced on Instagram that she would ski for China at the Beijing 2022 Games, her mother's country. She had competed for the US until then.

The IOC later said she had acquired Chinese nationality in 2019, and its executive board approved her change of sporting nationality that December, after China's Olympic Committee sent a copy of her Chinese passport.

The open question: China does not recognise dual nationality, and Gu has never said whether she gave up her US passport. In 2022, Red Bull removed a line from its website saying she had, after the Wall Street Journal asked about it. Her standard answer: when she is in the US she is American, and when she is in China she is Chinese.

Gu was not a one-off. For its home Games, China recruited athletes born abroad. At Beijing 2022, 32 foreign-born athletes competed for China, more than half of them American, according to Georgetown's Journal of International Affairs. Thirty of them played ice hockey; another was figure skater Zhu Yi, born in California.

Gu was the one who won. She became the face of Beijing 2022 for a country that wanted to show it had become a winter sports power.

Gu's golds came at Games that Washington refused to attend officially. On 6 December 2021, the White House announced a diplomatic boycott of Beijing 2022, citing "genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang". Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada joined. American athletes competed, but no US officials went.

Gu also carried the contradictions of the system she joined. During the Games, she replied on Instagram, which is blocked in China, that "anyone can download a VPN", adding that it is "literally free on the App Store". On Weibo, users answered that it was "not so free at all", and a screenshot of her comment was replaced by a blank image before being restored.

Another Californian daughter of a Chinese immigrant took the opposite path. Figure skater Alysa Liu's father, Arthur Liu, led student protests in 1989 and fled China after the Tiananmen crackdown.

In March 2022, the US Justice Department charged five men in schemes it said were directed by the Chinese government to spy on and harass dissidents in the US. Arthur Liu was one of the targets, and Alysa was named as a family member. China's Foreign Ministry called the allegations "trumped up".

In February 2026, Alysa Liu won Olympic gold in women's figure skating for the United States, at the same Games where Gu won gold for China. American commentators turned the two into a pair of opposites.

Gu earns from three sources, and only one of them is skiing. In 2025, Forbes estimates she made $0.1 million on the snow and $23 million off it. Forbes lists her nationality as China.

The state money only became public through a budget line. When Caixin reported it in February 2025, the article was deleted and Chinese social media posts questioning the spending were censored. Beijing then replaced the two names in its budget with a vague line about "outstanding athletes", according to China Digital Times.

The Wall Street Journal put the bureau's payments to Gu and Zhu at nearly $14 million over three years.

For Beijing, Gu is the perfect story: a global star who chose China. Her rise coincided with the boom of China's winter sports market and a carefully built soft power strategy around Beijing 2022, as Swiss broadcaster RSI noted. TIME named her to its 100 most influential people in sport in 2026, crediting her with drawing girls in China to skiing.

In the US, she became a political target. During Milano Cortina 2026, Vice President JD Vance said an American-raised athlete should want to compete for the United States, and she was not eligible for the $200,000 bonus paid to every Team USA athlete. Gu answered that critics lump China into one block and "just hate China", and said she had been physically assaulted over her choice.

She keeps both doors open. In April 2026 she co-hosted the Laureus World Sports Awards in Madrid with Novak Djokovic, the first time two athletes hosted the show. In October 2026, she spoke at a women's leadership event at Singapore Management University.