Eileen Gu is golden in first Beijing Olympic event – and right on cue – The Globe and Mail

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The rule for all Olympic crowds is no cheering and no crowding. Sit one seat apart. Clap if you must. But keep all droplets to yourself.

And then Eileen Gu showed up.

Beijing’s Olympic blueprint is pretty simple. Acquire another Games; repurpose existing facilities to accommodate winter sports; unleash Gu.

Her appearance at the Big Air final was as close as this Games has come to pandemonium. Social distancing went out the window. Cheering was general. At the most emphatic moments, a few masks came off. And that was before her remarkable come-from-behind gold medal performance.

She was second after the first jump and third after the second.

Needing something spectacular, Gu performed a jump that only two women have ever successfully planted in competition. She’s the second. The first had taken place about 45 minutes earlier. “I didn’t even know Eileen had that trick,” Canada’s Megan Oldham, who finished fourth, said afterward.

As her winning score came up, and just for a minute, you imagined yourself watching a normal Olympics. By the time they roll her out again on Sunday, it will be full-on Beatlemania.

Only 18 years old, Gu’s media polish is already at a high shine. The likes of Tom Brady could only wish to be this charismatic while saying things that are this boring.

“I’m so grateful for everything China has done for this Olympics,” Gu said. “I’m not here to beat other people. I’m here to push myself to the limit.”

She appeared to give similar answers in Mandarin and English – same intonations, same hand gestures. If it’s a script, it works as both a sales pitch, as well as a shield from criticism.

Largely unknown even a week ago outside China and X-Games circles, Gu’s backstory is suddenly a topic of general conversation.

She is the gift America (unwillingly) gave China – a California born, raised and trained freestyle skier who arrives here primed for multimedia stardom. She is the star who chose China (via her mother’s heritage).

According to some reports, she’s already making $20-million a year from Chinese endorsements. And that was before she’d done anything truly noteworthy.

She arrived at the big air final like Caesar coming into the forum. Every twitch elicited trills.

All the proper notes for an Olympic opening night had been hit – the huge build-up, the mild disappointment in qualifying (5th), the impossible pressure of the moment.

How big was this? IOC president Thomas Bach schlepped all the way out to the fringes of the city’s endless downtown to be there. Getting name-checked in the Closing Ceremonies? That’s love. Spending an hour in Beijing traffic? That’s respect.

Even Chinese tennis player and (if you ask women’s tennis authorities) possible political prisoner Peng Shuai was there. Bach said afterward that he’d sat with Peng, that she was leaving the closed loop and going into quarantine before going home.

If this was her last public appearance, it’s telling that Peng chose to dovetail it with Gu’s emergence.

Peng, Bach’s relationship with Peng, Gu’s relationship with China – that’s a lot of controversial storylines meeting in one place. Through the washing machine of sport, they all come out laundered by victory.

Four days in and everybody’s already tired of yelling about geopolitics. A potential COVID meltdown hasn’t materialized. There is no unspooling multi-day outrage to focus on.

So, as it always does, the focus has narrowed onto sport. Who’s winning what?

Other countries need to win in bulk, across disciplines. China – no Winter Games power – has a more focused approach. If Gu does the business, that vindicates their billion-dollar party.

Big Air was the correct place to begin this marketing assault.

The facility – a winter waterslide built in a derelict industrial zone – is an awesome venue. Not necessarily in a good way.

Surrounded by decommissioned nuclear-style smokestacks, it’s got a ‘Blade-Runner-before-the-yuppies-moved-in’ vibe. Alluring and vaguely horrifying, it may be the most 21st century sports setting in the world.

Big Air itself is the prototype ‘new’ Olympic sport. Visually impressive; a lot of fun; more than a bit silly. It’s sports for people who don’t have much patience for sports. Those people buy sneakers, too.

Gu has two more chances at gold, but she is already a total triumph. First impressions matter in a lot of places, but nowhere so much as an Olympics. She is now cemented in the public imagination as the comeback kid.

Whatever happens next just adds to the legend.

That makes the next week and a bit a kind of masterclass in modern sports marketing.

Used to be, being a great sportswoman or man meant you were really good at running/throwing/scoring. Not any more.

Ask Mike Trout. He may be the best baseball player who ever lived, and you couldn’t pick him out of a three-man line-up at spring break in Ft. Lauderdale.

These days, you need a full array of interests and entry points in order to diversify your content creation.

Watch Canadian snowboarder Mark McMorris work a mixed-zone. He may be freezing and tired and, sure, he’s not the gold medallist, but nobody is hitting his marks harder.

Still chipper; still delivering the same practised punchlines; still pumping his sponsors’ tires. That is modern athletics.

Gu isn’t just the entire package. She’s the manufacturer and the delivery system. She has the quality, the look and the polish, without any dangerous tendency to run off script.

Her CV is so perfect – a bilingual best-in-class who’s a fashion influencer, a would-be supermodel, a goofy tomboy and a Stanford STEM freshman – that you suspect she was lab-generated.

If you ask Gu why she switched America for China, you’ll get a boilerplate answer about “the opportunity to inspire millions of young people where my mom was born.”

She gave a version of it again at the big air competition. She was self-aware enough to begin it by saying, “My message has been the same forever …”

Yes, of course. What tween doesn’t see an attractive stranger doing backflips on skis and think, ‘Maybe I can be president!’

But she’s right inasmuch as she has now joined the global sporting power elite. What she does from here on out is news.

Only a few athletes belong in that club and most of them play professionally year-round. Gu’s got another ten days to make her pitch.

All she must do is win again, and then not say anything anyone can wrap an outraged headline around.

So far, so good.

One down. Conquering the whole world still to go.

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