Eileen Gu will be representing China in the 2026 Winter Olympics, having already won two gold medals and one silver medal at the 2022 Winter games. She began skiing when she was a small child and before she had turned 20 she was a model, world-class skier and the kind of student who nearly earned a near-perfect score on the SATs.
Gu spoke to SI Swimsuit about becoming a dominant female athlete in a male-dominated sport and how being built like a model doesn't lend itself to her chosen sport.
"My first memories were being in this rowdy group of boys on the chairlift, starting from age eight or nine and just pushing one another every day," said Gu. "So if one guy learned a trick, then I had to learn it. And if I learned a trick, then everyone else had to learn it."
Gu said that she wasn't on a ski team with other girls until she was 14 or 15-years old and she describes her early aesthetic as "middle school boy," which was obviously a far cry from her future professional work as a model.
"I was the only girl on my team," she told SI Swim. "So I definitely felt as though I stuck out a little bit and I spent most of that time trying to be a boy. I think was definitely trying to mask myself and trying to fit in and be more accepted. I just wanted to make friends, and I wanted to look like the other people in the industry, and for the most part, those were boys."
Gu is tall, which isn't out of place in the world of modeling, but is in the world of skiing.
"I wouldn't say I have the ideal body type for skiing in the sense that I'm way too tall," she said. "So if you think about kind of doing flips and think about gymnastics or think about figure skating, when you wanna flip and spin, it's easier to have a lower center of gravity. It's easier to be smaller. I am 5'9", so that is not gonna be happening for me. But I think what it taught me was to embrace what you have. There's certain things that you can't really change about yourself, and so learning to adapt your style and learning to adapt your skiing to those kind of genetic or inherent factors that you might have, it produces a different kind of style and it imbues your craft with your own touch, and that's something that I think is really beautiful."
Luckily, embracing her height in one career helped her come into her own in the other. "I think reconciling with my femininity, particularly when I turned 14, 15 and started working in fashion more, was a pivotal step of my development," said Gu. "I think it helped me grow into myself and accept all the different parts of me that make me, me."
As she closes in on her second Olympic games in February, Gu is excited about the growth of her sport and the increased number of young women participating in it.
"The progression of women's skiing has just been skyrocketing in the last, you know, five years, 10 years. It has been so inspiring to first watch it when I was younger, and then now be a part of it. It has made me really retrospective and made me introspective and thinking about, what is the legacy that I wanna contribute to this sport. And I think a big part of that really is inclusivity: Making girls feel as though there's a place for them and it's cool, culturally relevant, and something that they're not afraid to say yes to. I hope that someone can, you know, turn on the TV or turn on YouTube or watch me compete and be like, Oh look, she looks just like me. You know? And the idea of, this sport isn't for you, it doesn't even get in their head because the first time they're exposed to it is through someone who looks like them."
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Olympic Gold Medal Freestyle Skier Eileen Gu Makes Her SI Swimsuit Debut.
