Olympic skier Eileen Gu is having quite a moment, although it is a shameful one over which she apparently has no remorse and no concern. The February issue of Time magazine featured her on its cover. Then, she won silver in freestyle skiing slopestyle in Milan and is favored to also medal in other events. She is a Stanford student, a spokesperson for companies ranging from Red Bull to Tiffany & Co., a model, and the fourth-highest-paid female athlete in the world. She’s the kind of U.S. Olympic athlete you might expect to find on a cereal box.
There’s just one problem: Gu is not a U.S. Olympic athlete, as Vice President JD Vance has pointed out in his well-deserved criticism of her. Seven years ago, at the age of 15, she decided she would take her ski career to Communist China, even though she is a native-born American and a U.S. citizen. In a 2019 Instagram post, she excused her decision to ski for a tyrannical dictatorship in Beijing’s 2022 Winter Games as coming from a desire to “unite people, promote common understanding, create communication, and forge friendships between nations.”
She’s continuing to compete for the Chinese team in 2026 by saying it gives her a unique opportunity to “buil[d] her own pond” in a country with little representation for freestyle skiers. Of course, there is little representation in China for anyone else, and Chinese citizens seeking liberty, freedom, or relief from persecution are instead drowning in the pond that the despotic, authoritarian government has created for everyone to swim in, other than her.
If she were skiing for almost any other free nation, perhaps Gu’s arguments about friendship-forging and pond-building would hold some water. As it stands, she has chosen to reject representing her home country to instead compete for one of the most abusive and politically repressive regimes on the planet.
The State Department’s 2024 Report on Human Rights Practices summary of China’s “significant human rights issues” is too long to reproduce here in full, but it includes “arbitrary or unlawful killings; disappearances; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; involuntary or coercive medical or psychological practices;…; instances of coerced abortions and forced sterilization; trafficking in persons, including forced labor;…; and significant presence of some of the worst forms of child labor.” Many of these crimes are related to China’s twelve-year ongoing genocide against Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
The Time profile reports that Gu “doesn’t believe it’s her place to comment on… China’s checkered human-rights record,” despite the fact that she is currently studying international relations. She prefers to focus on the fact that she’s “made a lot of positive impact at nobody’s expense,” especially on Chinese participation in ice and snow sports, and believes that coming to a position on China’s human rights abuses requires “a lifelong search.”
In reality, of course, finding out enough about the Uyghur genocide to oppose it or China’s vicious treatment of its other citizens barely requires a Google search. That includes the outrageous persecution of democracy advocate Jimmy Lai, who was just sentenced to 20 years in prison. Gu would have to be deaf, dumb, and blind to not know about that – or does she just not care?
And calling an increase in snowboarding enough of a “positive impact” to justify switching loyalties to a nation willing to commit mass-scale atrocities is an insult to the many American-born Olympians who have used their international platforms to oppose, rather than excuse, such repression. Her unwillingness to recognize the brutality of the regime she now represents, which is using her as a propaganda tool to hide its abuses, is a sign of her superficiality, greed, and tawdriness.
Jesse Owens, whose life as a black man in segregated America was far less charmed than that of a Stanford-educated Porsche spokeswoman, saw his trip to the 1936 Berlin Olympics as his personal opportunity “to do battle with Adolf Hitler.” Unlike Gu, he recognized the human rights abuses already being committed in Germany before the Holocaust had even started.
Owens argued that the United States should withdraw from the Olympics due to Germany’s dismal record. Since we didn’t, he would do his best to beat them at their own games, with spectacular success to their great embarrassment. It would never have occurred to him to become a team member of the Nazis, unlike Gu, who is a willing participant in the Chinese dictatorship’s propaganda.
If only that kind of courage and honesty were having a moment at the 2026 Games. We are certainly not seeing it in Gu or the companies like Red Bull and Porsche that are using a Chinese Communist stooge to advertise their products.
Like what you’re reading? There’s a lot more where that came from.
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