LIVIGNO, Italy \u2014 The two best bets to win the gold medal in women\u2019s halfpipe skiing at the Winter Olympics on Saturday were born in the United States.<\/p>\n
Zoe Atkin competes for Britain and hardly anyone raises a fuss about it.<\/p>\n
Eileen Gu competes for China and never hears the end of it.<\/p>\n
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 something messy, even political.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo many athletes compete for a different country,\u201d Gu said after Thursday night\u2019s qualifying put her in the mix for her third medal of these Games. \u201cPeople 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\u2019s not really about what they think it\u2019s about.\u201d<\/p>\n
She was responding to a question stemming from the latest comments that drew her into the headlines: Vice President J.D. Vance told Fox News earlier in the week he would hope someone who benefited from growing up in the United States, the way Gu has, would want to compete under its flag.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s homeland, but also because of her success both on and off the snow.<\/p>\n
Not long after the Olympics are over, Gu will be back in Milan attending a fashion show.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cLike, if I wasn\u2019t doing well, I think that they probably wouldn\u2019t care as much, and that\u2019s OK for me,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cnever been talked about\u201d and she threw her support behind Gu.<\/p>\n
\u201cEileen is doing amazing. I\u2019ve actually known her since I was a kid,\u201d Liu said. \u201cSo I\u2019m rooting for her always.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Olympic charter says athletes must be a \u201cnational\u201d \u2014 a word similar to citizen but with different legal connotations \u2014 of a country to compete for it. Athletes who are nationals of more than one country have to go through a \u201ccooling-off\u201d period if they want to switch, though neither Gu nor Atkin have changed over their Olympic careers.<\/p>\n
It is not a surprise: Athletes in freeskiing and snowboarding \u2014 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 \u2014 spend most of their time traveling the globe caring very little about countries or anthems.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re all going to the same place, all traveling together,\u201d said Nick Goepper, the American three-time medalist who competes for his home country. \u201cThere\u2019s 25 guys who do this at a high level across the world and it\u2019s better to hang out and mingle with each other, just like people do.\u201d<\/p>\n
Besides Vance\u2019s 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\u2019t as developed in China as it is in the United States.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve never received criticism from anybody in the ski industry about any of these decisions,\u201d she said in an interview with The Associated Press last month. \u201cBut that\u2019s because I\u2019m friends with all of them.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s citizenship status is another source of constant conjecture, though she has never revealed it.) Atkin\u2019s father is British. Like Gu, Atkin attends Stanford.<\/p>\n
The 23-year-old, who won last year\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt also has a lot to do with my family and I guess I don\u2019t really care what anybody else thinks,\u201d she said. \u201cObviously, we compete for our nation, but at the end of the day, this is an individual sport and I\u2019m trying to do my best show and my best skiing. To me, that\u2019s all it\u2019s really about.\u201d<\/p>\n
Somewhere between Gu and Atkin sits Gus Kenworthy \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
He took some flak when he switched 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\u2019s final and left two others with top-10 rankings \u2014 including two-time gold and one-time silver medalist David Wise \u2014 at home.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou could be the fifth best person in America, ranked seventh in the world, and still not make the team,\u201d said Kenworthy, who won the silver medal in 2014. \u201cIt\u2019s great to have all these different countries represented. But sometimes it sucks to be in that position, and I\u2019ve been in that position.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not the only math that changes when the action-sports world gets tossed into the deep end at the Olympics.<\/p>\n
As Gu says frequently and said again Thursday, \u201cpeople are entitled to their opinions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pells writes for the Associated Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LIVIGNO, Italy \u2014 The two best bets to win the gold medal in women\u2019s halfpipe skiing at the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":481945,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,2724,7676,2934,4281,222169,213740,3,21733,222170,836,222171,217327,222172,21,19,22,20,7157,25,24,6601,58926],"class_list":{"0":"post-481944","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-associated-press","10":"tag-britain","11":"tag-getty-images","12":"tag-los-angeles-times","13":"tag-medal-count","14":"tag-milan-cortina-olympic-games","15":"tag-news","16":"tag-result","17":"tag-richard-heathcote","18":"tag-schedule","19":"tag-short-tracker-speedskater","20":"tag-tara-peterson","21":"tag-u-s-curler-taylor-anderson-heide","22":"tag-united-states","23":"tag-united-states-of-america","24":"tag-unitedstates","25":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","26":"tag-update","27":"tag-us","28":"tag-usa","29":"tag-wednesday","30":"tag-winter-olympics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=481944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481944\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/481945"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=481944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=481944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=481944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}