Eileen Gu Isn’t An Activist. She’s A Capitalist.

Eileen Gu is the only person in history to study quantum physics at Stanford and land a double cork 1620 at the Olympics — a move that requires the 22-year-old freestyle skier to spin 4½ times while rotating twice off-axis more than 20 feet in the air.

On snow, Gu is Einstein. One minute, she might be talking to her coach about pre-loading torsional energy through counter-rotation of the shoulders and hips before takeoff; the next, she is discussing better ways to bleed rotational velocity just in time to align her skis with a 38-degree landing slope — all while absorbing 5x her body weight on impact. It’s like putting a physicist in ski boots. Gu isn’t just an exceptional athlete; she is a master of her craft, one who obsesses over its most minute details.

Put her in a press room, though, and the vocabulary changes. The same woman who can explain a 1620 down to the motor neuron activation suddenly isn’t smart enough to comment on the Chinese Communist Party’s ongoing human rights abuses, arrests stemming from Hong Kong’s democracy movement, or the disappearance of tennis star Peng Shuai after she accused a senior CCP official of sexual assault in 2021.

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