Twenty-two-year-old decorated freestyle skier Eileen Gu is competing in her second Winter Olympics. So far in her Olympic career (Beijing and Milan/Cortina), she has won five medals. Not only that, but she is a model and a student at Stanford University with a near-perfect SAT score. The American media has fawned over her since her first Olympics in 2022.

There’s just one very big, very obvious problem: Gu is an American citizen, born and raised in San Francisco, California, yet she has chosen to represent her mother’s home country of China. That prompts a question: Why on earth is the media gushing over her?

She’s not our athlete. In fact, she represents our biggest geopolitical enemy, communist China, all while reaping the benefits of living in a free market economy and a constitutional republic.

Perhaps it’s a question of following the money. While Chinese companies do not directly own any part of news organizations like NBC that give Gu attention and air time, there is enough of a relationship to wonder whether money has exchanged hands.

Perhaps it’s the beauty factor. Gu is very attractive, charismatic, and evidently intelligent.

Whatever the reason, elevating her instead of focusing on the accomplishments of our own American athletic representatives in Italy is yet another reason the media is a hypocritical cesspool. They jumped all over skier Hunter Hess for saying that he has mixed feelings about representing the U.S. — even though they asked him about politics — and now they’re happy to promote a Chinese athlete as inspirational.

“Charisma and good looks cannot fully explain the almost complete absence of a sense of betrayal or disloyalty in the American media’s extensive coverage of Gu,” podcast host Mike Pesca observes in The Free Press. “The skiing star’s decision to compete for America’s most important geopolitical rival has been almost completely frictionless — bringing in its wake only great celebration and remuneration. This would have been hard to imagine at any other time in U.S. history.”

Syndicated columnist Rich Lowry was even more pointed when he explained, “Gu skis for China, a choice that is a little like deciding to represent a fascist country during the 1930s.”

We have slightly more recent history to consider than Nazi Germany. Gu’s choice to represent China is akin to an American during the Cold War choosing to represent the USSR. It’s a bad look that should give any patriotic American heartburn. Russia, whose goal during those Cold War years was to present its culture and communist political system as premier, would have loved such a coup.

Zituo Wang, a USC-based researcher and Chinese national, told Pesca, “Even if [the Chinese people] know she was American, they think China is so strong that they can turn an American girl to represent us. That shows the strength of China.”

China loves its American turncoat athlete and pays her millions to represent its deleterious values and win medals on the world stage. Gu was the fourth-highest-paid female athlete in 2025. According to The Wall Street Journal, Gu and a fellow American competing for China, figure skater Zhu Yi, have received a combined $14 million over the past three years.

While it’s not outright legal treason, it’s “adjacent to treason,” posits National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke, himself a naturalized citizen who emigrated from England. “She chose to represent a communist dictatorship over the United States. That is the wrong call.”

There is also a question about the legality of Gu competing for China while still retaining her U.S. citizenship. China does not allow dual citizenship, yet Gu is an American citizen and, apparently, a surreptitious Chinese one as well. Otherwise, how would she be allowed to compete in the Olympics representing the ChiComs? According to Olympic bylaws, “Any competitor in the Olympic Games must be a national of the country.” Gu routinely avoids these citizenship questions, and how this is allowed is a mystery.

Eileen Gu has made her choice and profited from it. And the legacy media that is pushing this “All-American Girl” story should be loudly rebuked. Gu is not an inspiring figure. She is a mercenary who chose to represent a communist dictatorship over the free Republic that raised and nurtured her. Celebrating that decision is why we call leftists unpatriotic. They give more grace and nuance to actual authoritarian regimes than they do to their own people and our coequal system of government. It’s truly disgusting.