An American hero and an American(ish) traitor have emerged from this year’s Winter Olympics.
Eileen Gu has emerged the villain of the 2026 Winter Olympics. Gu, 22, is an American-born and -raised freestyle skier who has competed for China in skiing competitions since 2019. She took home a silver medal this year, falling short of gold after falling on the slopes.
Gu has a ready-made foil, too, in a twist out of a movie: figure skater Alysa Liu, who helped secure a gold medal for Team USA this year.
Liu and Gu began life on similar trajectories. Both girls were born in the early 2000s in Northern California. Both are half Chinese, half white. Liu, like her four younger siblings, was conceived through an anonymous egg donor and a gestational surrogate (a story for another time). Gu’s conception remains the subject of mystery and conjecture — popular speculation says her mother may have used a sperm donor, and/or a surrogate, but those theories remain unconfirmed by Gu herself.
Liu began skating at age five, Gu joined the Northstar California Resort free-ski team at eight. The two crossed paths at least once in childhood, at a Northern California Chinese Culture-Athletic Federation meeting in 2018. Footage shows Gu sharing a hug with her mother, Liu sharing a hug with her father. Another commonality: Both girls were spirited to athletic dominance by an ambitious, likely domineering, parent.
And both girls were reportedly targeted by China’s “naturalization project,” which aimed to recruit ethnically Chinese athletes living overseas.
Here, their paths diverge.
China looked to figure skating, where the “best female prospect was Alysa Liu, a 16-year-old, two-time American national champion who grew up across the bay from Eileen Gu. Her father, however, was a former dissident who fled persecution in 1989: he was not open to persuasion,” according to The Economist.
But China had another fantastic prospect in Gu — one with a willing parent.
“And though [Gu] spent only one month each year in China, after 2015 she seemed to be shadowed by the motherland wherever she went. In mid-2016, when Gu was 12, her mother gave China Central Television (cctv), the state broadcaster, full access to their lives; a few months later, a cctvfilm crew began following Gu around for almost a year from China and America to New Zealand and Europe. That year, Lu Jian even lived with Gu’s family in California for three months,” says The Economist. Liu Jian was one of Gu’s first mentors. Jian is an Oxford-educated economist, a former adviser to China’s cabinet, and the founder of China’s first ski resort.
“Ten years ago, only 500 people in China could ski, and they were all professional athletes,” Jian told the Los Angeles Times in 2005. “This year, 5 million Chinese people will visit ski resorts. You can say this represents the new China.”
Jian reportedly invited Gu to a “ski-off” in 2013 and would eventually become Gu’s mentor and sponsor. He nicknamed Gu “Captain America,” according to The Economist.
The outlet continues: “CCTV’s first long documentary about Gu aired in China during the 2018 Winter Olympics – and served as Gu’s coming-out party in China. The documentary’s main purpose, it seemed, was to present Gu as an authentic Chinese patriot. In the opening scene, the 13-year-old and her mother are driven through Tiananmen Square, the historic plaza where Mao once revved up the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution – and where pro-democracy protests were crushed in 1989.”
Arthur Liu, Alysa Liu’s father, was reportedly involved in those very protests.
“As they ride through the square, Gu Yan urges her daughter to read the characters on the wall. ‘Long live the People’s Republic of China,’ Gu recites in Chinese. Her mother then asks her to identify the man in the giant portrait above the gate. Gu turns to her and beams: ‘Mao Zedong!’ They laugh together. Then, on cue, they gaze out with radiant smiles across the vast expanse of Tiananmen Square. ‘So beautiful,’ says Gu Yan.”
While the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) glowingly propagandized Gu, they began spying on Liu and her family.
Liu, then 16, was reportedly informed of this fact by an FBI agent, whom she met at a Japanese restaurant.