Short read: Inside the mind of Eileen Gu, Winter Olympics superstar — and so much more

Beyond AI, the changing world order with the ascent of China as a rival superpower to America is shaking up geopolitics and is now playing out in the sports arena too. The Winter Olympics doesn’t get great coverage here in India but its latest superstar Eileen Gu was at the receiving end of the American vice president’s ire. Eileen was born in America to an American father and a Chinese mother and chose to represent China at the Winter Olympics. The controversy aside, there is so much more to Eileen who is now the most decorated freestyle skier in Olympic history with six medals across the 2022 Beijing and 2026 Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics.

“Eileen Gu is a scientist at work, experimenting on her own mind and body. She spends a lot of time in her own head, analysing every thought, forming her “working hypothesis,” just like she does with her skiing, constantly tinkering, striving for “higher optimization.” Such words are just part of her vernacular.

Inside her head is, ‘not a bad place to be,” said the self-proclaimed “statistics nerd,” who loves the Olympics because of the records she can break. After winning halfpipe gold on Saturday at Livigno Snow Park, she explicitly pointed out that it made her the most decorated freestyle skier, male or female.

Gu’s eight-year-old self would be “obsessed” with the young woman she has become. “I would love me, and that’s the biggest flex of all time,” she said.

The American-born athlete has won the most gold medals of any free skier, is the highest earner at the 2026 Winter Olympics, according to Forbes, is an IMG model, a Stanford University student, and a controversial figure, having decided to represent her mother’s native China aged 15 in 2019.

….  the Wall Street Journal reported that Gu and fellow American-born figure skater Zhu Yi, who competed for China at the 2022 Winter Games, were paid a combined $6.6million (£5.8m) by the Beijing Municipal Sports Bureau in 2025, and all told, have been paid $14m over the past three years.”

The article gets into the mind of the multi-talented and articulate athlete:

“When Gu drops into the halfpipe, listening to American rap, her brain is still working at 100mph, sometimes visualizing a takeoff one second before performing her trick. “Sorry, I’m going to get a little nerdy,” she said last week, explaining the minutiae of the trajectory, angle and degrees of each of her jumps. But for 30 seconds on the pipe, she is in her “truest form,” a flow state in which the noise is temporarily dialled down.”

This flow state was exhibited by yet another Chinese born American winter Olympian, Alysa Liu, who won the gold in figure skating, a beautiful sport in itself and brilliantly captured in this NYT piece. Or you could just watch her in action here and know what flow means.

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