After the big air gold, freestyle skier Eileen Gu took silver on Tuesday morning in the final of the slopestyle event.
Born in the United States, the young woman chose to compete under the banner of China, the country of her mother, in 2019.
Perceived by the Beijing regime as a way to make fun of the Americans, the Eileen Gu case ultimately turns out to be a double-edged sword for the Chinese authorities.
From our special correspondent in Zhangjiakou,
In military jargon, this is called first-rate war prize.
By choosing three years ago to compete in the Winter Olympics under the Chinese banner, the recent double medalist in freestyle skiing Eileen Gu, born in California to an American father and a Chinese mother, offered the regime communist a wonderful opportunity to slip a small one to Uncle Sam. In the current context of political and economic tension between the two giants, there are no small victories.
If the United States necessarily plays it low profile in this case, China on the contrary jumped at the chance to make the kid a symbol of the crossing of the power curves of the two behemoths.
In Beijing, for example, it is difficult to miss the Gu phenomenon as his image is plastered all over the capital.
In the aftermath of her success in the big air final, the
Global Times
, a press organ close to the Party, was quick to see in Eileen Feng Gu the “reflection of the openness of the country”.
The rise of China vs the decline of the American empire
“After his first medal, says Antoine Bondaz, China specialist and researcher at the Foundation for Strategic Research,
the media touted Chinese-style multiculturalism.
Above all, through it, they want to communicate about the attractiveness of the country.
It is because China is powerful, that it has more to offer it, because the United States is in decline between quotes, that it has decided to compete for them.
In fact, it joins all the elements of language that have been put forward by the regime for a very long time.
That is to say, the rise of their model and the decline of the American model.
»
And Gu's interest in it?
If she has never ceased to justify her choice by "the possibility of helping to inspire millions of young people where my mother was born", she has always refuted the idea of having mainly responded to the sirens of money. .
However, its (very) numerous contracts with Chinese companies are proving very lucrative.
And according to figures cited by the Bloomberg agency, his gold medal in Beijing at the start of the Games could bring him more than 10 million additional dollars in sponsorship contracts.
A communication exclusively focused on the Chinese market
This is probably why the communication of the teenager, managed exclusively by her mother, focuses only on China.
“There are too many political and commercial issues for them to bother responding to the Western press, abounds the professor at Science-po.
They don't care, the whole business is in China, the contracts are there, it's there that she is promoted and it's there that we can break her career in quotation marks.
“The
New York Times
knows something about it, he who tried many times to negotiate an interview with her before the start of the Games.
John Branch, the journalist dispatched to Zhangjiakou to follow the freestyle skiing and snowboarding events, tells us the underside of the negotiations.
“I was in contact with his mother several times because we really wanted to have him interviewed, unfortunately their demands were such that we had to refuse.
There were too many forbidden subjects, ”he breathes.
The first of them, burning, being that of his dual nationality, but we will come back to this.
“She does not want to damage her image by discussing politically sensitive topics.
That's why I was curious to see how she would do at the press conference after her gold medal.
I saw !
»
And U.S. too.
In the ultra-crowded press room in Beijing, Eileen Gu could not escape this dreaded face-to-face with the American press this time, the compulsory press conference for the medalists being written in black and white in the rules of the CIO.
And as expected, US journalists lined up behind the microphone to try to finally get answers on THE annoying subject: the nation listed on his passport.
Eileen Gu has never officially said if she had been granted Chinese nationality and therefore, in fact, if she had to give up her American citizenship.
In China, dual nationality is purely and simply prohibited.
Unsurprisingly, the attempts of our colleagues were unsuccessful.
A science of dodging that touches on the sublime
It must be said that the skier is gifted and weaves between the questions with an ease – almost robotic – that is both disconcerting but also, it must be said, a little scary.
We would be remiss, in the middle of the French presidential campaign, to deprive you of this formidable lesson in political rhetoric in the form of a gigantic waterfall of lukewarm water.
-
A speaker: Are you still an American citizen?
- Gu: I have already talked about it a lot, and I expressed my gratitude to the USA, they have always supported me and for that I will always be grateful to them. The Chinese team too and that's why I find that sport can unite people. There is no need to link all this to questions of nationality which divide people. We are all here together to push our limits.
- A second journalist: We understand that you want to unite people through sport, which is to your credit, but you are not clear on this question of nationality. Are you an American citizen or a Chinese citizen?
- Gu: So I feel Chinese rather than American. I am American when I am in the United States and I am Chinese when I am in China. I have never ceased to repeat my gratitude to these two countries which have made me who I am today. I don't take advantage of one more than the other. My mission is to use sport as a vector of unity, of interconnection between the two, not as a vector of division. It benefits both and if you don't agree with that, that's not my problem.
A dodging masterclass, we tell you.
His message on Weibo censored by the regime
“The strong hypothesis is that she does not have Chinese nationality but American nationality, advances Antoine Bondaz.
However, in China, the laws are extremely strict on this point and the question is: does she make an exception when it suits her?
Its status raises a whole other series of subjects that the political authorities do not want to address.
If we learn that she is still American, it is not impossible that the sponsors let her go and that her career suffers.
»
The case of Eileen Gu is therefore not as idyllic as initially thought for the communist regime.
What if the case of the skier was ultimately a poisoned gift for Beijing?
Asked by a user on the Chinese social network Weibo about her right to use Instagram, when "millions of Chinese who do not have Internet freedom", she replied that "everyone can download a VPN, c is literally free on the Apple Store”.
“Literally, I'm not 'anyone.'
Literally, it's illegal for me to use a VPN.
Literally, it's not f**king free at all,” one Weibo user responded to #EileenGu https://t.co/xlDJbis3d4
— Pete Quily (@pqpolitics) February 15, 2022
Going viral in a few hours, the message of the double medalist at the Olympics was finally censored and replaced by a black square.
To regain her total freedom of speech, the athlete will have to wait to return to the United States, where she will return to the prestigious Stanford University.
By then the spotlights of the Olympic Games will have gone out, to the great relief of the Chinese authorities.
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Sport
Ski
China
Winter Olympics 2022
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