On the prime of the hill earlier than her final run within the Milano Cortina girls’s freestyle huge air closing, Eileen Gu, 22, stared intently into the dazzling void. Her activity, at its easiest, was this: She wanted a robust rating to medal, and an distinctive mark for gold. She dropped in.
Off the lip, Gu launched right into a left-side double cork 1260—a maneuver that slices by area, dragonfly-sharp, and that she’d realized solely the week earlier than—reaching again to seize the surface of her proper ski and holding it deep into her rotations. She traveled by the air with the ultra-clean, environment friendly athleticism she’s identified for, touchdown backwards. Then, she set free an elated, “What the heck?!”
Gu waited patiently for her rating: 89.00. The quantity propelled her to the silver medal place, which she animatedly celebrated; she had not competed within the self-discipline since Beijing 4 years in the past (there, at simply 18, she’d taken gold). As the competition wrapped, Gu hugged her sizable contingency of followers, her mom Yan, the gold medal winner Megan Oldham of Canada, and even Thomas Bach, the previous Worldwide Olympic Committee president, who was cheering her on from the stands.
Picture: Getty Pictures
After we spoke a couple of days earlier than the Video games started, Gu instructed me: “For this Olympics, the one factor I can hope is to land runs that I really feel happy with.”
Gu, who was born in San Francisco however who competes for China, the place her mom is from, is a five-time medalist in freestyle snowboarding. This tally makes her essentially the most adorned of any girl within the self-discipline’s historical past. Alongside together with her Beijing huge air gold, she collected a halfpipe gold and slopestyle silver in China. In Italy, she earned silver in slopestyle.
One would suppose that, given her leads to Beijing, Gu could be much less nervy going into Milano Cortina. That was in all probability true to some extent, however she spoke to me with a lot confidence and readability that I questioned if she’s ever gotten nervous.
Picture: Lorenz Richard/Pink Bull
