Olympian Eileen Gu’s decision to snub US and ski for China is nothing short of a hypocrisy

It isn’t easy being Eileen Gu. 

The champion freestyle skier said the other day, after she had to settle for a silver medal in an event at the Olympics, that “sometimes it feels like I’m carrying the weight of two countries on my shoulders.”

Gu would be carrying the weight of only one country if she had chosen to represent her native USA at the games, rather than a hostile totalitarian state. 

Gu skis for China, a choice that is a little like deciding to a represent a fascist country during the 1930s.

China is bent on undermining US power and supplanting Western values.

It runs a gulag and has established a surveillance state that would make George Orwell blush.

It is contemplating an invasion of Taiwan and is almost certainly the country most likely to nuke Los Angeles in a major war. 

Gu’s explanations for why she turned her back on the country where she was born and raised (her mother is a Chinese immigrant) are tinny and unpersuasive.

She’s spent significant time in China and says she admires Chinese culture, but there would be many ways to express that feeling without giving Beijing the propaganda victory of a superstar athlete draping herself in its flag.

She says she thought she could inspire more girls to take up skiing by competing for China, with its nascent freestyle skiing program, than if she stuck with the U.S. 

Really? Given that Gu is charismatic and gorgeous and has a legitimate modeling career on top of being a top-notch skier, she’d still be a compelling ambassador for the sport even if she competed under the Stars and Stripes. 

What Gu insists had absolutely nothing to do with her decision is money, although she made an estimated $23 million over the last year, padded by a litany of Chinese endorsement deals. 

Who knows what inducements she’s been offered to be the centerpiece of Beijing’s effort to recruit more foreign athletes in order to enhance its national prestige?

Gu came to the defense of US Olympian Hunter Hess, after President Donald Trump slammed the freestyle skier for saying he has “mixed emotions” about representing the United States.

She said the controversy “runs contrary to everything the Olympics should be.”

This is rich coming from Gu, who feels an obligation to stay quiet about much worse than an immigration agency enforcing immigration law. 

She wouldn’t dare, say, mention the name of Jimmy Lai, the persecuted Hong Kong dissident who isn’t young, pretty or athletic, just extraordinarily brave. 

When Time magazine asked Gu about China’s systematic repression of the Uyghurs, she said she’s “not an expert” and it’s not “my business.”

Asked whether, as a Stanford University international-relations major, she could learn something about it, she said she doesn’t trust “data,” needs to do extensive research on the ground and “this is a lifelong search.”

So, perhaps when Gu is 92, she finally will have established whether or not China is now abusing the Uyghurs. 

This is obviously a cowardly dodge — and from a celebrity athlete who preaches “empowerment.”

Gu portrays herself as a bridge to China, but she’s really a symbol of how its closed system corrupts all that it touches.

It tells you all that you need to know that she won’t even say whether she’s still a US citizen.

She needs to be a Chinese national to compete under its flag, and China isn’t supposed to allow dual citizenship.

There is an alternative model here: US figure-skater Alysa Liu was courted by China, but her father, who fled the country after Tiananmen Square, would have none of it.

China responded with a campaign of surveillance and intimidation, and there were fears for Liu’s safety when she competed at the Beijing Olympics in 2022. 

In other words, Liu carried the weight of rejecting an insidious authoritarian regime, a burden Gu knows nothing about.

X: @RichLowry