On the morning of February 8, 2022, in the freestyle ski women's big jump at the Beijing Winter Olympics, Gu Ailing won the championship with a difficult move that had never been done before. This is also a historic breakthrough for Chinese athletes in this project.
Previously, with the arrival of the Beijing Winter Olympics, "Gu Ailing" gradually became one of the hottest names. But most people's understanding of her is limited to labels such as "genius", "school bully", "champion", and Gu Ailing's life is far richer and more interesting than these labels.
Wen | Lubeka
Edited | Golden Stone
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On July 19, 2013, a girl under the age of 10 signed up for Weibo, named "Frog Princess Gu Ailing", and posted a photo of herself winning the championship in skiing.
On January 27, 2019, 15-year-old Gu Ailing won the world cup steeplechase in Italy.
On June 6, 2019, Gu Ailing announced on social media that in 2022, three years later, she will represent the Chinese team in the Beijing Winter Olympics, "Beijing, I am coming!"
Since then, the name Gu Ailing and the sport of freestyle skiing have gradually entered the vision of the Chinese public.
Gu Ailing when he registered Weibo at the age of 9 Tuyuan Gu Ailing Weibo
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On September 3, 2003, Gu Ailing was born in San Francisco, USA. Her father was an American and her mother was a Chinese, and she grew up living with her mother and "grandmother" - she called her mother's mother "Grandma" and followed her mother Gu Yan's surname.
Regarding the origin of Gu Ailing's name, according to The Economist, in November 2002, Gu Yan's sister Ling died in a car accident while driving her sister's BMW convertible. Less than ten months later, the daughter of her sister Gu Yan was born, and she was named Ai Ling (English name Eileen).
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Gu Ailing's mother, Gu Yan, grew up in Beijing and studied at Peking University. According to the information on the LinkedIn, after graduating from Peking University, Gu Yan went to the United States to study, and successively studied biochemistry and molecular biology at Auburn University, molecular genetics at Rockefeller University, and MBA at Stanford University's business school. Her husband, Gu Ailing's father, graduated from Harvard University.
When Gu Ailing was 3 years old, Gu Yan went to work part-time as a ski instructor at the Polaris Resort Ski Resort in Lake Tahoe, California, because she liked skiing. She took Gu Ailing with her every time, she skated her own, sent Gu Ailing to the ski school on the ski slope, and learned with other children.
Later, in an interview, Gu Yan said: "I have loved to play since I was a child, that is, words are not as good as teaching by example."
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When she first started learning to ski, 3-year-old Gu Ailing wore many layers of clothes every day, like a "meat ball", rolling on the ski slope, always wrestling. But she rarely cried, and she later recalled, "I was busy on the little ramp while the other children were crying and complaining."
She quickly showed physical talent, learning faster than her peers, and at the age of 3, she could skate with a 5-year-old, and at 5, she could skate with an 8-year-old. When she was 8 years old, the ski school no longer accepted her, and at that time, the school's advice to her mother Gu Yan was: Please send Gu Ailing to a professional ski team.
All this makes Gu Ailing like skiing more and more, because she enjoys herself is different. "The soft, grainy snow that flows under my snowboard makes me feel like I can do anything," she says.
Gu Ailing was a child in the image source network
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At the age of 9, Gu Ailing showed the talent of becoming a top professional skier. In her second year on the professional ski team, she finished first overall in the American Junior Ski Competition.
But even so, her mother Gu Yan did not let her give up her studies, but went to a full-time school while training and participating in competitions.
Gu Ailing said that this taught her time management. She reads books and writes homework on her way to training and competitions. Knowing that she has less time than full-time skiers, she will struggle to catch up, and the efficiency will increase in the process. She said of herself, "Genius may be a part, it may be, but I myself think that the majority is the balance of effort and time, and the self-disciplined lifestyle." 」 In her opinion, this also gives her more choices in life, "when I am tired of studying, I think I can go skiing on weekends." 」
Even if Gu Ailing won many championships in adult competitions and World Cups later, this habit was still maintained by her. "It's all about the brain, learning to organize your time more efficiently." Know when you're tired and when you can't talk to people."
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Since Gu Ailing was two years old, Gu Yan has taken her back to China for at least two months every year.
In China, Gu Ailing found that the small partners around her began to attend the Olympic mathematics cram school very early, in order to work with the small partners, Gu Ailing also went to learn the Olympic number, which laid an excellent foundation for her mathematical results - in the Middle School in the United States, Gu Ailing's mathematical test results have always been the first, and even broke the school's math test record.
Later, every summer vacation, her mother would take her back to Beijing to go to Haidian Huangzhuang to take extracurricular tutoring classes and learn mathematics. Gu Ailing said that her mother told her, "If you come to China for ten days of classes, you can top the United States for one year."
When preparing for the US college entrance examination SAT, Gu Ailing also chose to return to China to make up for classes. She felt strongly China's advantages in exams, "searching the Internet for instructional books, and almost all I found were Chinese editions."
In 2019, Gu Ailing completed two years of high school in one year and graduated from high school a year early. That way she has more time to prepare for the Winter Olympics. She was also the first student in her secondary school to graduate early.
In September 2020, Gu Ailing scored a high score of 1580 on the SAT test with a score of 1600 and received an acceptance letter from Stanford University as desired.
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In the eyes of many people, Gu Ailing's success stems largely from her mother Gu Yan. In order to support Gu Ailing's skiing, every weekend or holiday in the ski season, Gu Yan will drive a four-hour car to send her daughter to skiing and training. It takes eight hours to drive back and forth every day, and Gu Yan has driven through more than a dozen snow seasons.
In the eyes of Gu Ailing's coach in the United States, Gu Yan is a veritable "Tiger mom". Hanley, the principal of Gu Ailing's ski training institution in the United States, described Gu Yan this way, "She will control all the training for Gu Ailing", Hanley said, Gu Yan is the most coercive person he has ever met, "she always smiles and tells you how great you are, but afterwards you will find that she has a request, she always wants her daughter to get special treatment." 」
Today, in addition to training and competing with her daughter, Gu Yan has also been a private investor and expert for Fusion Investment in China. She let Gu Ailing focus on participating in a variety of ski competitions, but it is an extremely expensive expense for an individual athlete, paying not only for the coach, but also for travel costs of flying around the world to compete. In Hanley's view, Gu Yan's dedication to her daughter as a mother is extremely rare in the United States, but "she will never back down."
In the list of the Chinese freestyle ski jumping and slope obstacle course teams at this year's Winter Olympics, Gu Yan's name also appeared in the management column.
Gu Ailing and her mother Picture source Gu Ailing Weibo
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But in Gu Ailing's eyes, the mother is not a strict character. She described her mother as not a "tiger mother", but a "rabbit mother". She said that what her mother did was to respect her choices and help her achieve her goals, "I choose a thing, she will not let me make mistakes, she taught me how to decompose step by step, how to achieve." 」
Talking about her educational philosophy, Gu Yan said that she was educated in China since she was a child to become a "perfect person", "When I was a child, I felt that if I didn't score a hundred points, it would be a very big mistake."
But she didn't want Gu Ailing to pursue perfection like she did, and she kept telling Gu Ailing that she didn't have to go to Stanford; when she went out to compete, she wouldn't require Gu Ailing to win the championship. She said, "If I want to talk about ideas, I remember two sentences, the first sentence is what Their teacher said when Ailing entered the school, don't correct their typos, don't hit the child's creativity." The second sentence is the idea learned, praise them less for their cleverness, more praise for their efforts."
But sometimes, Gu Ailing is the better one.
In 2016, Gu Yan accompanied Gu Ailing to Yancheng Lake to participate in the competition, which was the first time That Gu Ailing participated in the adult group competition, which meant that Gu Ailing could get points and participate in the ranking in the world freestyle skiing field.
But the day before the game, Gu Ailing had a fever of 40 degrees, and her throat hurt so much that she sat on her mother's lap and cried. Because there was no time to adapt to the venue, the next day's game, Gu Ailing made a mistake in the first slide, but still won the silver medal. Back at the residence, Gu Ailing has been holding the big jumping table competition after computer research. Gu Yan did not want her daughter to fight too hard, she comforted Gu Ailing that she had not practiced, and she was still sick, "just adapt to it first."
But Gu Ailing kept asking "why," and she stubbornly retorted, "When the game is played, no matter who skips it or not." The next day's jumping competition, Gu Ailing won the gold medal under the condition of lung discomfort.
Wang Xiaoyuan, the editor of GOSKI, who has interviewed Gu Ailing and her mother many times, wrote in an article, "At a large level, it is the development path of competitive sports athletes that affect the environment, and at a smaller level, it is the result of family education and personal efforts." Ailing has benefited a lot in both areas."
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Actor Huang Jue once performed a group of portraits called "Hello Girls", and Gu Ailing was the eleventh girl he shot. When posting photos on Weibo, Huang Jue also recorded some conversations with Gu Ailing's mother -
"Sister, how did you educate this child?"
"If I want to talk about ideas, I remember two sentences, the first sentence is what their teacher said when Ailing entered the school, don't correct their typos, don't discourage children's creativity." The second sentence is the idea learned, praise them less for their cleverness, more praise for their efforts."
In another interview, Gu Yan said: "My education for Gu Ailing is that the first is to sleep, the second is to study, and the third is to play."
Gu Ailing still has to ensure that she has ten hours of sleep — when she was a child, the number was 15 hours, and after elementary school, it was 13 hours. Mom kept telling her, "I don't sleep enough to have the energy to play."
Huang Jue's portrait of Gu Ailing
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In addition to skiing, Gu Ailing also learned to ride a horse since childhood, participated in singing competitions, and won medals in school basketball competitions, long-distance running competitions, and cross-country running competitions.
In an interview at the age of 13, Gu Ailing said that playing basketball has given her two particularly important things, one is a friend, basketball has made her make a lot of friends, and the other is "ideas", "All sports, including basketball, don't think about other people doing better than you, whether it's other boys or other girls, bigger than you and smaller than you, you are the best, you have to start practicing with this idea, all people who play well start like this." 」
Hanley, the principal of Gu Ailing's ski school, said, "She is also one of the top long-distance runners in California."
At the age of 11, Gu Ailing won the third place in the women's team, the first place in the women's 12-year-old group, and the second place in the under-14 group in the San Francisco Bay Area Independent Private School 2500-meter cross-country competition.
Gu Ailing participates in cross-country running in the United States Tuyuan Gu Ailing Weibo
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Peter Olynnik, Gu's coach at Red Bull Camp, described her as saying that in addition to her talent, Gu Ailing was passionate about skiing and there was always a flame around her.
As an individual athlete, Gu Ailing is extremely disciplined, which is a high work ethic in Peter Orique's view. "She was always the first to train and the last to leave. She goes to a lot of races, and when she comes home, she runs and trains, which is rare."
At the age of 11, Gu Ailing had not yet made skiing a profession, and in interviews at the time, she often showed her childlike side. "Skiing is a thing I like to do now, but it's not a profession, and I'm going to do a lot of different things when I grow up," she said.
But when it comes to skiing, her description is very vivid: "I like skiing, because when skiing, when a bird flies, it flies and then lands." 」 She said that this feeling is very powerful, it is difficult to feel when walking, "the feeling of skiing and flying, and the feeling of happiness, may be the two most addictive." 」
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As an extreme sport, freestyle skiing has both challenges and risks.
In 2016, Gu Ailing broke her collarbone while training. After a 7-week break, start training again.
In 2018, during a jumping training, the foot bone was broken.
At the end of 2018, during the World Cup China competition held in Chongli, Gu Ailing fell on the head while training, lost his memory on the spot, and was diagnosed with concussion.
In 2021, on the eve of the World Championships, Gu Ailing suffered a torn ligament in her right hand and a crushing fracture of her hand bone. In order to participate in the competition, she did not go to the operation immediately, because she had to recover for six weeks after the operation, and could not ski and participate in the subsequent competitions. She wore protective gloves and attended the World Championships without ski poles before going for surgery after the game.
Talking about the post-surgery arrangement, she said, "I will not be idle when the time comes, and I guess I will use the time to recuperate and run a marathon."
The second season of the documentary "My Time and Me" recorded an indoor training session of Gu Ailing, and after taking off, she landed heavily on the edge of the foam pool, and she was in pain and could not stand up. But facing the camera, she moved her mask up, not wanting to show her pained expression.
Injuries are hard to avoid, but it can also help athletes better understand the sport they're playing.
On the occasion of Chongli's injury, Gu Ailing met his former coach, Prossell, who was then serving as the coach of the Chinese training team. After learning that Gu Ailing was still hesitant to quit the competition after learning of the injury, Prossell showed her a video of different athletes injured and told her, "If you want to be an athlete, there will be different forms of injuries." Competitive sports is a process, and if you care too much about the outcome, it often doesn't come. If you pay attention to the process, the results will eventually come."
Subsequently, Gu Ailing chose to abandon the game.
Two months later, Gu Ailing, who was recovering from injury, competed in the FIS Steeplechase World Cup. Prior to that, her best result at the World Cup was eleventh.
In the training before the competition, Gu Ailing met her idol, Sarah Hoflin, the champion of the freestyle ski slope obstacle course at the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, and Gu Ailing went to Hoflin to take a photo.
In the subsequent training, Gu Ailing completed a new move, and Hovlin encouraged her after seeing it, and then tried the same action himself, but it did not succeed. This surprised Gu Ailing, who once again became aware of the uncertainty and contingency of the sport itself. The next day' game, Hovelin won the championship, and Gu Ailing was second with a slight disadvantage of 0.49 points.
15 days later in Italy, Gu Ailing in the first two rounds of the final did not play well, the third round of reversal, won his first World Cup sub-station championship, and climbed to the first place in the overall standings, at that time, Gu Ailing was 15 years old.
Gu Ailing's first World Cup sub-station champion source Gu Ailing Weibo
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Gu Ailing said that skiing is a game of control, and maintaining balance is the most important skill, which requires the brain to carry the body, because "the brain understands what it will look like, and the body will follow suit."
She learned piano from her grandmother since she was a child, which also helped her a lot on the slopes. Before each action, she would imagine this action as music in her mind, imagining that after the jump, the wind in her ears emitted different beats, and different movements had different rhythms, "Cork 900 has an action that is 'Da Da Da Da
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For Gu Ailing, winning has always been important.
In the 2021 World Championships big jumping competition, Gu Ailing found that the players who appeared before her had chosen ultra-difficult actions, and she also temporarily decided to make a move that she was not skilled enough and landed not stable enough. Because, in her opinion, if I don't do this action, "there is no point in this game," she said, "I have to go into any game, I have to have a winable hope." 」
Gu Ailing said that his spirit of play, this desire to win, comes from grandma Feng Guozhen.
In kindergarten, grandma taught her the multiplication technique, and when she was done, she said, "You go to school and compete with other people." When I went to school, Gu Ailing found that in the United States, this is what will only be learned in the third grade of primary school.
Grandma hopes that Gu Ailing will take the first place in everything. When she was a child, Gu Ailing participated in the school running competition, and before she finished running, she was in second place, and when she turned the corner, she heard her grandmother and a group of people shouting: "Eileen NO.1, Eileen NO.1." She turned her head to see, in the middle of a row of American parents, standing a grandmother who was one meter and five meters tall. She couldn't figure out how grandma, who didn't speak English, had organized a group of people to follow her and shout "Eileen NO.1."
According to The Economist, Feng Guozhen, now 86, still insists on running a mile a day.
Gu Ailing and Grandma Picture Source Gu Ailing Weibo
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Gu Ailing said of her decision to become a Chinese citizen and represent China at the Beijing Winter Olympics, saying she began thinking about it when she was ten years old, because in China, many freestyle skiing events are still in their infancy, "when I think of the possibility of becoming a role model for others, I feel that this opportunity should not be missed."
But when she announced the decision, questions abounded in the United States. Former women's team extreme games gold medalist Jen Hudak called Gu Ailing an "opportunist," saying, "She became an athlete like this because she grew up in the United States, where she has a first-class training ground and coaches, which may not be available in China."
In an interview with Time Magazine, Gu Ailing also mentioned the insults that poured out on the Internet, saying: "I have received a huge number of private messages, and it is very uncomfortable to read thousands of speculations and hate speech when I am in such a sensitive stage of life."
But the more questioned she became, the more determined she became of her choice, because "sport offers the best hope of uniting peoples and nations with very different perspectives," she said, "because sport can really turn a blind eye to race, gender, religion and nationality, just to challenge the limits of humanity."
In an interview with The New York Times, when asked about China and the United States, Gu Ailing said: "I can do a backflip in a U-shaped snow field about seven meters high, it is not politics, but challenging the limits of human beings and connecting human beings."
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In addition to skiing, Gu Ailing is also deeply interested in fashion. When she was 15 years old, she was invited to Paris Fashion Week for the first time, and she saw that some people could go out in plastic bags, which made her feel a new stimulus, and it turned out that a person can be so "different". This also provides her with another opportunity to express herself, and at the same time, it also brings her great commercial value.
After announcing his return to China, Gu Ailing signed a contract with sports agency IMG. Prior to that, Li was also a contracted athlete for IMG.
IMG has taken over more than twenty luxury brands for Gu Ailing, as well as the shooting of several fashion magazines. Since 2021, at least 23 brands have signed contracts with Gu Ailing, bringing her hundreds of millions of yuan in revenue every year. The 18-year-old Gu Ailing also appeared on The Forbes " 2021 China Celebrity List " .
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In an interview, the reporter asked Gu Ailing about the cultural differences between Young Chinese and American people, and Gu Ailing replied: "Retouching." She said that almost all of her peers in the United States don't repair the map, and if you do, everyone will think that you are not confident. "Shouldn't I love myself a little more?"
She explained that the United States is a multi-racial country, whether it is Caucasian, yellow or black, each has its own beauty, everyone generally thinks that they are very good-looking, do not have to retouch the picture, "if you retouch the picture, in the end everyone will still see if you are really beautiful." 」 I want to do the opposite, look at the photos and feel average, look at myself, wow, so beautiful!"
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As the only athlete to play in three sports in the freestyle ski competition, Gu Ailing has won every medal after joining the Chinese nationality, which is breaking the record in many fields of Chinese freestyle skiing.
In the December 2021 Freestyle Ski Jump World Cup final, she completed a difficult two-week frontflip plus Double cork 1440, slid down the slopes and into the sky, completing four 360-degree spins in less than three seconds and landing smoothly on the ground. Seeing her performance, NBC's narrator exclaimed, "She absolutely stomped the field!" (She stepped on the field)
A week before the Beijing Winter Olympics, at the X Games at the World Extreme Games, when Gu Ailing won her first competition, she instinctively wanted to raise her hand to celebrate, but quickly shrank back. Because there was still a game the next day, she didn't dare to celebrate. Her reaction surprised those around her, who repeatedly stressed to her, "You won the X Games game!" In the field of extreme sports, this is the top event. But it wasn't until the next day, when Gu Ailing won another gold medal, that she raised her hands above her head and cheered and celebrated when she landed.
In this X Games, Gu Ailing won two gold, one bronze and three medals, becoming the first Chinese athlete in the history of X Games to win a gold medal.
Gu Ailing said, "When someone told me this data, I started crying, which is the main reason why I decided to go skiing in China, to create this history."
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In this X Games competition, Gu Ailing's main opponent in the big jump event, French athlete Tess, completed the Double cork 1620 degree turn and won the championship. This new record has made Gu Ailing's gold medal at the Winter Olympics suspenseful.
On the short video platform, someone sent out a poster suggesting not to put too much pressure on Gu Ailing, but Gu Ailing replied after seeing it: "Why don't you have more confidence in me?"
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In the past two years, in interviews, Gu Ailing often mentioned a wish - he hopes to lead more Chinese girls to participate in the sport of skiing.
In junior high school, she attended a girls' school with the motto: Educate, Inspire, empower women. This made Gu Ailing begin to have a sense of speaking up for more women.
At the age of 12, in a lecture organized by the school, the theme of her speech was: Women in Sports. This stems from her experience when she joined the North American League ski team at the age of 8, when she was the only girl on the team.
She described the experience this way: "When I first joined the team, I was placed in the lower group, but despite this, I quickly climbed to the main team. At that time, I was the only girl on the team, and at first I was left out in the cold, and no one wanted to sit in the chair lift with me. Gradually, I was accepted and made some of my best friends. But it took three full years."
Later, in the freestyle skiing competitions she participated in, the prize money for the women's champion was usually $600, while the prize money for the men's champion was $12,000. This made Gu Ailing realize early on that in the world of competitive sports, there is a huge inequality between genders.
In that speech, she described this inequality this way: "In today's world, men have a better chance of participating in sports-related careers than women, and many people believe that this is simply because men's muscles are naturally larger and stronger than women's muscles, so over time stereotypes have gradually developed into a negative definition of female athletes, and women are often deprived of suitable sports opportunities because of their gender."
In that interview with Time magazine, Ms. Gu said she hoped that when she returned to Beijing again, she would hear her Chinese friends tell her that there were more girls skiing in China than ever before. Gu Ailing said, "Even if it's only a small part of it, it's all worth it."
Gu Ailing's speech at school
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After the Beijing Olympics, if there are no accidents, Gu Ailing will return to campus and go to Stanford to study.
When it comes to her choice of major, Gu Ailing said she is interested in many majors. She loves to write, wants to be a journalist, and is particularly fond of molecular genetics and quantum physics.
She always remembers a sentence that her mother told her: "If you want others to respect you, you can't be an athlete who can only ski, has no independent thinking ability, and has no knowledge."
More than two years ago, Gu Ailing used this photo to announce her return to China.
(Note: Some of the information comes from the documentary "Top of ice and snow", the documentary "My Time and Me", the documentary "Into Gu Ailing", China News Network, The New York Times, The Economist, Time Magazine, Washington Post, etc.)