22-year-old Olympic skier Eileen Gu was born and raised in the United States. She learned to ski here. She goes to school at Stanford. Her father went to Harvard. Her first international competitions as a teenager were for the United States. So why is she competing for Communist China in this year’s games in Milan – and why is the global media so eager to lionize her betrayal of the country that gave her everything?
Gu’s answer is her mother – a first-generation immigrant from China who moved to the United States and became a successful businesswoman. She says that skiing for China is her way of honoring her mother’s heritage.
Of course, the real answer is a bit less innocent than that. As The Wall Street Journal reported last week, Gu, who first opted to ski for China ahead of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, was the fourth-highest paid female athlete in the world last year – thanks in large part to generous contributions from the Chinese Communist Party. In addition to lucrative endorsements from brands eager for exposure in the Chinese market, leaked documents showed that Beijing’s sports bureau was set to pay Gu and figure skater Beverly Zhu, another U.S.-born Olympic athlete, some $6.6 million in 2025 and $14 million over the past three years.
But Gu doesn’t appear to see any problem with that arrangement – or with supposed dual loyalty to the United States and its largest geopolitical rival. As she put it in 2020, “When I’m in the U.S., I’m American. But when I’m in China, I’m Chinese.” (Notably, Gu was required to become a Chinese citizen to compete for China. China does not allow dual citizenship, but Gu has failed to say whether she renounced her U.S. citizenship.)
Adding to the controversy, Gu has offered plenty of criticism of the United States – the country that gave her the opportunity to achieve her Olympic dreams – and President Donald Trump. But she has been entirely mum on China’s egregious human rights abuses. When asked about Beijing’s genocide of Uyghurs, she responded, “I don’t think it’s my business.”
Former NBA player Enes Kanter put it best in a statement lambasting Gu:
“Eileen Gu is a traitor. She was born in America, raised in America, lives in America, and chose to compete against her own country for the worst human rights abuser on the planet, China. She built her fame in a free country, then chose to represent an authoritarian regime while cashing in on endorsements linked by watchdog groups to mass detention and forced labor camps. When human rights come up, she disappears. That’s not neutrality. That’s a choice. She chose to play for a country responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of its own people and that is running concentration camps right now, instead of the country where she was born and given opportunity.”
Four years ago, one could have forgiven Gu for spurning the United States. At just 15, she hardly could have been expected to understand the significance of her decision, which was undoubtedly more her mother’s than her own. This time, however, it’s different.
But perhaps even more disgraceful than Gu’s betrayal is the media’s fawning treatment of her, and the fact that her disloyalty has only been a story in conservative media. Imagine the national outrage if a prominent American-born athlete chose to compete for the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War.
Yet now Gu has been featured on the cover of Time Magazine and enjoyed glowing coverage from the likes of Forbes, NBC, and The New York Times – all while she poses draped in the flag of America’s principal adversary.
Here’s how conservative commentator Stephen L. Miller put it in a viral post on X:
“Everything you need to know about our media is summed up in these Olympics. Journalists grill American athletes about a ‘rising fascism’ in the United States. Meanwhile an American who takes millions of dollars to ski for an actual authoritarian communist dictatorship with concentration camps and zero free speech is treated like a beautified celebrity. This is who our media is.”
All that criticism is fair and justified. But the constructive question we also should be asking ourselves is how we even got to this point. Gu isn’t the only American-born athlete competing for China, and she certainly isn’t the only athlete who can’t find anything positive to say about her homeland. Halfpipe skier Hunter Hess infamously stated he had “mixed emotions” when asked about how he felt competing for the United States, prompting a barb from President Trump.
Ultimately, Eileen Gu is a reflection of the culture that she was raised in – a culture that failed to instill enough patriotism in her to turn down communist dollars.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped teaching young Americans like Eileen Gu that citizenship is more than a passport or a platform for personal advancement. We stopped teaching that the American flag is not a brand to monetize, but a symbol of the freest, most successful constitutional republic in human history. Representing the United States on the world stage should be one of the highest civic honors imaginable – not a business decision weighed against endorsement contracts.
That failure begins in our classrooms. For years, civic education has emphasized America’s flaws while downplaying its achievements. Students learn to critique their history more than to understand it and to see the Constitution as suspect rather than exceptional.
In that environment, patriotism withers and dies on the vine, resulting in the embarrassing spectacle of an American athlete defecting to a communist regime.
The moral contrast between the United States and China should not be difficult to grasp. The United States is the nation that allowed Gu’s mother to immigrate, succeed, and raise a daughter who could attend Stanford and become an Olympic champion. Communist China is a regime that censors speech, persecutes minorities, and crushes dissent.
Gu made her choice. The more important matter is whether we will recommit to teaching the next generation why wearing “USA” across your chest is worth more than money could ever buy.
Shane Harris is the Editor-in-Chief of AMAC Newsline. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.
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