Olympic Skier Eileen Gu is Flying High
With several broken records and fashion campaigns under her belt, freestyle skier and global Tiffany & Co. ambassador Eileen Gu is ready for Olympian greatness.
Photography Rebekah Campbell
Styled by Liz McClean
Back in November, less than a year before she would attend her first class at Stanford University, Eileen Gu became the first woman to land a Double Cork 1440. At the Stubai Glacier ski resort in Austria, the Chinese-American freestyle skier exploded from a Red Bull–branded ramp, and, like a human fidget spinner, rotated her body four times clockwise and upside down twice. She was just practicing.
In her still-nascent sports career, Gu, who has competed for China since 2019 and will represent the country this February at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, has made a routine out of breaking records. At the 2021 X Games in January, she became the first female rookie in the event’s 25-year history to earn three medals: golds in the superpipe and slopestyle competitions (spectacles of aerial tricks performed on a pair of poplar sticks down, respectively, a sort of snow-coated horseshoe and an obstacle course of ramps), and a bronze in the Big Air contest (it’s as treacherous as it sounds). Six weeks later, she returned to that same halfpipe in Aspen to compete at the FIS Freestyle World Ski Championships, where she again won two gold medals, the only athlete ever to do so, this time with a broken hand.
But Gu, who was raised in the Bay Area by her mother Yan, a trained biochemist with an MBA from Stanford, has not restricted herself to ski-world success. In the last year, she has emerged as a rising star in the world of fashion, attending the Met Gala in Carolina Herrera, sitting front row at the Louis Vuitton show in Paris, and modeling for magazine covers as well as labels such as Brunello Cucinelli and Victoria’s Secret. In June, she became, alongside the actors Tracee Ellis Ross and Anya Taylor-Joy, a global ambassador for Tiffany & Co., which seems like a natural fit, as the 18-year-old old skier has always been a jewelry addict. “My hands are constantly adorned with rings, my neck with layered necklaces, and I even overcame my fear of needles in order to wear earrings,” she says. Right now, Gu is starring in two campaigns for the storied jewelry brand, including the T1 collection, which she loves for its “balance between elegant simplicity and striking boldness,” as well as the newly-debuted Knot collection. The youthful, risk-taking spirit of both collections pair perfectly with Gu’s adventurous streak.
HAIR Shin Arima
MAKEUP Laramie
PRODUCTION Paul Preiss
PHOTO ASSISTANTS Matt Baffa and Brandon Jacobson
STYLIST ASSISTANT Amer Macarambon
PRODUCTION ASSISTANT Somer Merriman and Mike Lighston