Star skier Eileen Gu switched from Team USA to Team China for 2022 Winter Olympics

Iconic American brands like Tiffany’s and Cadillac continue to sponsor Californian skier Eileen Gu, the poster girl of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics despite her turning her back on Team USA to instead represent China and promote the Games for them worldwide.  

The 18-year-old was born and raised in San Francisco. She attended high school in there, and has won a place to study at Stanford. Her mother Yan is a first-generation Chinese immigrant and her father, reportedly American, has never been publicly named.

Despite competing as an American for most of her youth career in freestyle skiing, Gu will this year compete at the Olympics for China and she is now promoting the event for the Chinese, narrating videos online and appearing in commercials.  

She made the decision in 2019 at the age of 15, claiming at the time she wanted to inspire a generation of young Chinese girls to pursue winter sports – which are comparatively less celebrated and glamorous in Asia than in the US. 

It is unclear now where Gu’s American citizenship stands – China does not recognize dual citizenship and minors under the age of 16 cannot renounce their US citizenship because they are not deemed mature enough to make the decision. 

Gu’s reps will not confirm whether or not she has given up her American citizenship, or if China has asked her to. 

While choosing to represent China – where she is known as ‘Gu Ailing’, ‘the snow princess’ and has 1.3million on Weibo – she maintains significant sponsorship deals from American brands like Cadillac, Tiffany’s, Visa, Therabody, Victoria’s Secret and Oakley.

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After touching down in China last week, Eileen Gu delighted fans on Weibo – where she has 1.3million followers – with a picture with some dumplings

Gu is pictured with her Chinese mother, Yan. She was born in San Francisco and grew up there. Her father, reportedly American, has never been named publicly 

In 2019, at the age of 15, Gu announced plans to compete for China at the Olympics, and not the US. She said she wanted to inspire a generation of Chinese youngsters at the Beijing Games

In interviews, she doesn’t seem to recognize or discuss the huge conflict of representing one of America’s longest-standing foes while still cashing in on her celebrity. 

‘When I’m in America, I’m American.

‘When I’m in China, I’m Chinese,’ Gu, who speaks fluent Mandarin, said in an interview with Red Bull’s Bulletin recently. 

When she touched down in Beijing last week, she went on Weibo to tell fans she’d just finished a plate of dumplings. 

Gu’s decision to abandon Team USA and compete for China seems to be down to the speed at which skiing is expanding as a celebrity sport there. 

When China was awarded the Winter Games in 2015, the country announced plans to open at least 800 new ski resorts. 

Gu – who had grown up in San Francisco but traveled every year to China as a child – said she wanted to be part of that growth. 

‘In the beginning, I knew every single person in the park because there were only 10 or 20 of us in the whole country. Now it’s the trendiest place to be.

‘In the US, I grew up with all these idols and I wanted to be that for somebody else,’ she said in an interview with Red Bull. 

She has made no public comment or acknowledgement of how China treats its athletes, much less of the long-standing tension between the US and China. 

Gu still enjoys partnerships with American brands like Tiffany’s, Cadillac, Victoria’s Secret and Visa 

Gu is one of Victoria’s Secret new ambassadors. She was signed after she announced her decision to compete for China 

Eileen Gu at the Met Gala in September. She thanked Victoria’s Secret and Tiffany’s for sending her to the event, along with Anna Wintour for inviting her 

Her mother Yan, who travels with her on private jets to sporting competitions and fashion shows, did not immediately respond to DailyMail.com’s inquiries on Tuesday morning. 

It’s unclear what in the way of endorsement deals or sponsorships she has received from Chinese businesses,

In China, she is referred to as ‘the snow princess’. 

She guest-edited this month’s issue of Vogue plus, an online offshoot of Vogue China, where she talked about the internal ‘code switch’ of balancing her American and Chinese identities. 

She has also appeared recently on the cover of Elle China.  

According to Red Bull, she appears in promotional videos for the Olympics, running along the Great Wall of China while carrying the Olympic torch. 

Those videos do not seem to be online, which is in keeping with China’s strong grip on what is published about it. 

The State Department did not respond to inquiries about her citizenship on Tuesday.  

Gu is ‘everywhere’ in China, according to international journalists who are now on the ground in Beijing 

Gu is far more well known in China than she is in the US currently, despite her having partnerships with major US brands. Her Weibo account is shown 

According to a recent Wall Street Journal profile of her, Red Bull previously published that she had given up her US passport in order to compete for China. 

Red Bull then changed her bio to remove all mention of her citizenship. 

She is not the first star to side with China rather than the US on the international stage. 

Last year, Canadian-Chinese actor Nicolas Tse renounced is Canadian citizenship and pledged allegiance to China.

He claimed, like Gu, that he had a duty to inspire Chinese youths and spread the country’s culture around the world. 

Even American stars and Hollywood have pandered to the Chinese to save their spots in the gargantuan markets there. 

John Cena last year apologized after acknowledging Taiwan as a country and not a Chinese territory, profusely begging his Chinese fans for their forgiveness on social media.