Olympic superstar Eileen Gu dodged questions about whether she renounced her US citizenship after securing a gold medal for China in Beijing.
Gu, 18, was pressed on the issue and avoided answering after she dramatically won the women’s big air freestyle skiing competition for the host nation.
The San Francisco native, who has a Chinese mother and American father, learned to ski on the slopes of Tahoe but announced her competitive allegiance to China in 2019, at the age of just 15.
Gu obtained a Chinese passport after her decision, although it is unknown of she renounced her American passport in doing so.
The International Olympic Committee requires athletes to hold passports for the countries they compete for, and China does not recognise dual nationality.
But as a 15 year-old, US law means that she would not have been able to relinquish her American citizenship, which the State Department say can only be done after age 16.
One of her main sponsors, Red Bull, wrote on their website that Gu had given up her US citizenship, before taking that passage down.
Following her Olympic victory, Gu was asked directly by a reporter, “Are you still a US citizen?”
“I’ve always been super outspoken in my gratitude to the US and to the US team as well. They have been nothing but supportive to me, and for that I am forever grateful,” she replied.
“And same to the Chinese team. They have been so, so supportive of me. And so in that sense, I feel like sport is really a way in that we can unite people, it doesn’t have to be something that’s related to nationality, it’s not something that can be used to divide people.
“We are all out here together pushing the human limit.”
Gu, who is a brand ambassador for lingerie company Victoria’s Secret, Tiffany & Co. and Adidas, graduated from the prestigious University High School in San Francisco, and will attend Stanford in 2022 after the Olympics.
She is also signed to the IMG modeling agency and has appeared on the cover of Vogue and Elle magazines in China.
While she has more than 240,000 followers on Instagram, Gu, who is known in China by her Mandarin name Ailing, has more than 1.3m followers on Sina Weibo.
