Eileen Gu Risks China Fan Base With US Olympic Envoy Role
- Gold medalist to be ambassador for US 2030 or 2034 Olympic bid
- American-born skier says she wants to promote ‘globalism’
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Skier Eileen Gu’s decision to join the US bid to host a Winter Olympics sparked fierce debate in China over the American-born athlete’s split loyalties between the world’s two largest economies.
Gu’s announcement at the TIME100 Summit in New York that she’d become an ambassador for the US effort to hold the event in Salt Lake City in 2030 or 2034 was the second-most-read topic on China’s Twitter-like Weibo on Wednesday morning. A hashtag of the freeskier’s comments that she didn’t regret representing China at the Winter Olympics racked up some 26 million reads.