- US-born Chinese skier adds second gold to impressive haul
- First action-sports athlete to win three medals at a single Games
This time Eileen Gu didn’t leave things late. After her first two events at the Winter Games came down to nail-biting finishes, the emerging American-born superstar representing China lay waste to all-comers in the Olympic freeski halfpipe final, adding to her big air gold and slopestyle silver to complete an unprecedented hat-trick of medals in the mountains northwest of Beijing.
The 18-year-old soared into history on Friday morning in becoming the first action-sports athlete to win three medals at a single Olympics, delivering on years of hype that intensified in the months leading up to the Beijing Games and grew to deafening levels over the past week-and-a-half as her culture-straddling origin story has become the subject of intense public debate on both sides of the Pacific.
