In the immediate moments after she did the impossible, there were no words from Eileen Gu. Raised in San Francisco and competing for China, there didn’t need to be a language. There were screams, and there were tears.
Gu, the supermodel who is perhaps the most fascinating star of these Beijing Games, became the youngest freestyle skiing gold medalist in Olympics history with an incredible jump in her third and final try that vaulted her from third to first Monday night.
She entered her final jump in position to medal — athletes are judged on their two best scores, so she was playing with house money — and needed to pull off a trick she had never done to have a shot at gold.
She closed her eyes, visualized what had never occurred, and skied down the 200-foot big air structure before catapulting herself off and completing 4 ¹/₂ spins — a 1620. In doing so, she became the second woman to complete the trick in competition.
The first? France’s Tess Ledeux, whom Gu bumped from first place to second.
Gu needed a 93.75 score in her final run for a chance to hop up the medal stand and wound up with a 94.50. Ledeux followed with a switch 1440 but landed awkwardly with one ski high in the air, which cleared the way for Gu’s gold.
Ledeux fell to the ground when she saw her score and realized her gold had slipped away. Gu hugged and comforted her.
Bronze went to Switzerland’s Mathilde Gremaud, who fell in her final jump attempting the same trick Gu had just completed. In the final jumps, Gu came up largest in the big air.
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“I am so, so happy. This is the best day of my life, that was the best moment of my life,” a teary Gu said in an interview with China state-affiliated media. “Moments like this make everything so worth it. I really put blood, sweat and tears into this. Sorry, I’m just really emotional right now.
“And I’m so happy to have the home crowd here backing me.”
The 18-year-old is polarizing in the United States, where she learned to ski and which she turned down so she could represent China, where her mother was raised. Gu has said she wants to be a role model for young girls in Asia.
“In the U.S., growing up, I had so many amazing idols to look up to,” she told the AP last year. “But in China, I feel like there are a lot fewer of those. I’d have a much greater impact in China than in the U.S., and that’s ultimately why I made that decision.”
With striking eyes that led her to modeling deals with Victoria’s Secret and Vogue and more than 400,000 Instagram followers — and now the first of what she hopes will be three golds — Gu will have a large platform to influence. She will enter the slopestyle and halfpipe events as the favorite to win.
After her final run, with tears in her eyes and the shouting done, she could be heard telling herself, “Definitely not crying, definitely not crying.”
