20 Amazing Facts About Eileen Gu, The Rising Star

May 22, 2022

Winter Olympics 2022 might be over. However, the limelight on Eileen Gu, a champion freestyle skier, has yet to fade away. The 18-year-old female has impressed the whole world with her talent and amiable personality.

Besides her successful career in sports, many other things about her may interest you.

Things You Do Not Know About Eileen Gu

If you want to know more about Eileen Gu, read these 20 amazing facts.

Eileen Gu was born in the United States. However, she is not fully American. She has a Chinese mother and an American father.
She shocked the whole world when she decided to swap her American team to represent China. It happened when Eileen Gu was 15 years old. From the Chinese continent, she is a sportsperson to look out for in the half-pipe, big air, and slopestyle competitions.
The news of representing China was announced by her in 2019 on her official Instagram handle. She changed her teams for the 2022 games. In the post, she explained that she got an opportunity to help inspire millions of young people during the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, her mother’s birthplace. For her, this opportunity was an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
She has always been passionate about freeskiing. Gu has proved her freeskiing prodigy right from the beginning. Her recent wins bagged her two golds and one bronze at the Winter X Games.
Eileen Gu made a record with her unmatched form by becoming the first-ever female rookie to participate and win in three disciplines.
Her winning streak continued when she entered the 2021 FIS Snowboard and Freeski World Championships in Aspen. This achievement made her the first Chinese woman to win multiple gold medals.
If you think Eileen Gu is good only in sports, think again. She excels in academics as well. Not many people know this, but Gu has received an offer from the globally renowned Stanford University. However, she could not start her university because of the 2022 Olympic Games.
Time and again, Gu has faced negative comments from the Asian community for her American upbringing. She has also received a lot of flak for championing a male-dominated sport. Eileen is a strong advocate of gender equality and women’s representation in sports.
Besides giving her best shot at the sports, Gu has also pulled off many modeling assignments and brand endorsements. She has represented several international brands in her modeling career, ranging from Tiffany & Co, Fendi, and Gucci. The star is also setting fashion goals with her stunning style statements.
She has contracts with high-profile modeling agencies such as IMG Models Worldwide and has already graced the cover of Chinese Elle and Vogue.
Talking more about her modeling career, Eileen Gu has been invited to the Met Gala and Paris Fashion Week. She also has her hands full with multiple projects. When it comes to fashion sense, she is the star to watch out for.
Eileen Gu is a diverse sporting talent. She grew up in sunny San Francisco and had a ski resort nearby her home. Thus, her passion for skiing developed when she was very young. Gu’s penchant for sports wasn’t restricted to skiing alone. Her other sporting pastimes included rock climbing and horse riding. She even took part in the competitive cross-country running.
In November 2020, Forbes included the two-time Youth Olympic Games champion in their China 30 Under 30 entertainment and sports list. Gu also became the youngest of the nine athletes to cut. She thanked everyone on social media with a caption, “So beyond grateful and humbled to be the youngest person listed.”
It is not wrong to say that Eileen Gu is a multitalented person. Besides being good at sports and studying, she is good at music too. The freestyle skier shared in an interview that she can play the piano. She has been playing for nine years now. She has also uploaded videos of playing the instrument on her YouTube channel. If she wasn’t a sportsperson, she may have made it as a talented pianist.
She credited her success to a healthy lifestyle that includes peaceful sleep. Eileen sleeps 10 hours a day. In an interview with Vogue Singapore, she stated that her mother let her sleep 15 hours a day when she was a child. As she grew older, her sleeping hours reduced to 13 hours, and now to 10 hours.
While she might appear perfect to the audience, she has had her fair share of struggles growing up. She used to struggle with eating for a period of time. It was during the pandemic when Elieen hooked onto the diet videos on TikTok, where she saw how little girls ate. She got influenced by it. But fortunately, it stopped. As of now, Gu is following a healthy diet.
Before she decided to be a professional freestyle skier, she was a competitive cross country runner, which continued for seven years.
No training for any athlete has been easy, and the same goes for Elieen. Her training included intensive skiing sessions from 9 am to 12 pm before going for a lunch break. She also added running to her routine.
Experiencing injuries is normal when you are an athlete. The same thing happened with Eileen. In March 2021, she shared she was wearing a cast to protect her injured head from further injuries before she received surgery after the ski season. Her injury was severe. She broke the metacarpal on her pointer and also tore the ligament of her thumb.
Eileen Gu once published an essay in The New York Times. She was looking forward to sharing her writing works with a large audience. The champion soon managed to make her dream come true. She published an essay, “Love and Fear” in the New York Times. The essay is all about her take on the fears that an 18-year-old teenager experiences and how to get rid of them.