Eileen Gu’s performance in the freestyle ski events at the Beijing Winter Olympics has been completely indomitable. She makes these gravity-defying runs with jaw-dropping tricks (like her double-cork 1620 in Big Air, her double-cork 1080 in Slopestyle, or her show-stopping 13’2” hit in Halfpipe), and she makes them look effortless. She’s a superb athlete, an honors student, a fashion model and – incredibly, given her talents – just a genuine, humble and warm-hearted person overall. Unfortunately, her treatment by American politicians, and in American news media and social media, has been nothing short of abusive.
By choosing to run for her mother’s home country, the People’s Republic of China, rather than her father’s home country of the United States, media personalities and politicians were quick to question her loyalty. NBC may just have been ‘raising questions’ about it (yeah, sure), but Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Will Cain lost no time labelling her ‘ungrateful’, and Carlson additionally opined that her decision should be met with ‘collective revulsion’ by patriotic Americans. On the other side of the party-political coin, Democratic senator Claire McCaskill tweeted that she ‘d[id]n’t get it’, why an American would choose to compete for China – even though we have Americans at the Olympics also competing for Mexico, Great Britain and a host of other countries in these same games. Ugh, indeed.
In general, the spin of official opinion in the United States was that Eileen Gu was competing for China for purely mercenary or opportunistic reasons, as if she was seeking chances there that she wouldn’t be qualified for here… which is ridiculous on its face for two reasons. It’s quite clear, given her talent, that she would have been welcomed with open arms should she have chosen to compete for the US team. And it’s also clear from the interviews that she’s given that her motivations are far from mercenary: she sees herself as something of an ambassador for her sport in China. And her overall attitude in interviews is, as said above, one of a gentle and modest teenager who skis for the love of the sport. When Eileen Gu hadn’t won any medals yet, the official line was to question her Americanness. The idea was to make her seem disloyal, unpatriotic and self-interested.
But now—with two gold medals and a silver medal around her neck—the American news media are singing a very different tune. The idea is still to discredit Eileen Gu, but they are taking a different tack now. They are trying to give her the Harrison Bergeron treatment, and weaponise Tumblr liberalism, identity politics and wokeness against her. ‘Chinese women look at Eileen Gu and do not see themselves’, Vice Magazine opines. She’s too white, too well-educated, too privileged to be like them. This viewpoint is echoed in outlets like Quartz and the Wall Street Journal (see how the Murdoch media empire is trying to play both sides here?). The British New Statesman goes as far as to compare Eileen Gu to Soong Mei-ling, and slimily insinuate that she has nothing to do with ‘restauranteurs and laundrymen’ of her own day.
So now that she is a success story in her sport, the way in which American news media are attacking Eileen Gu is by calling the authenticity of her Chineseness into question. They’re trying to guilt her with talk of her ‘white privilege’, and gaslight her into thinking she has nothing to do with the country for which she’s chosen to compete. This is how the vampire castle operates. As the late great Mark Fisher puts it, it ‘specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd.’ All of these aspects have been present from the start in the media and social media treatment of the champion skier.
Thankfully, Ms Gu is not buying it one bit; more power to her. She’s secure enough and mature enough not to let these bad-faith criticisms from the nationalist right and the woke liberals get to her, and her response to her critics and detractors so far has been, basically, ‘cry ab it’. Unfortunately, the vampire castle has succeeded in drawing blood from another Asian athlete in another event.
Kamila Valieva, the fifteen-year-old Volga Tatar figure-skating phenom from Kazan, was probably the key factor catapulting the Russian [Olympic Committee] toward their gold medal in Teams. Watching Kamila on the ice is like watching both an expert dancer and an elemental force of nature at once, as she exudes both poise and power. Grace and love for the art flows through her every move, and her Olympic skates have been no exception to that rule. Emotions flow very close to the surface in her performance – that is why she exudes such a powerful presence. That is why during the women’s short programme, she was considered the leading favourite for the ROC team to win gold.
However, Ms Valieva tested positive in a Swedish lab test for WADA over Christmas for trace amounts of a heart medication, trimetazidine, which has a pharmacokinetic half-life of seven to twelve hours. Drug tests are usually returned within one to two days; there’s a good reason for this, because after five days to about two weeks (depending on the bodily substance being tested), the clinical validity of a drug test on a given sample is ruined. So the results of this test were delayed, unconscionably, for two months; and the timing of the release of these results – after the medal ceremony in the teams competition – is more than just suspicious, it’s slimy. Her drug tests at the Olympics themselves all came back perfectly clean. Under these circumstances, for the American commentators like Johnny Weir and Tara Lipinski to turn around and call her a ‘cheater’ – and Adam Rippon to call her a ‘dirty f—king cheater’, to boot – after singing her praises throughout the teams event, looks a lot like bullying.
They must have realised this early on, though, because a couple of days after this they were all singing a much different tune as well. Probably after intuiting how directly taking out their anger at a fifteen-year-old might look, they all cagily transposed it onto her coach (Georgian national Eteri Tutberidze) and the other ‘adults’ around her. And then came the inevitable identitarian Tumblr-liberal rage directed at Valieva on behalf of track runner Sha’Carri Richardson in comparing their situations and accusing the IOC of racism (despite Valieva also not being white by American standards). Quite honestly, the only reaction in English-language media that I’ve seen that looks anywhere close to human is the assessment by Sally Jenkins in, of all places, The Washington Post, when she said that ‘you can only hope that the obvious purity of Valieva’s performance, her relieving clean lines, supreme lightness in the air and unenhanced artistry, will overcome it all, and she will be allowed to do what she was born to do: skate.’ Everything else, though – the calculated sanctimony of it all, the sheer and utter insincerity of all the ‘sympathy’ for Valieva that sat under the calls for her suspension and punishment, has been sickening to watch.
But it worked. Valieva lost her nerve. And there’s no doubt that the media-driven scandal was the cause.
She took falls in the free skate which caused her to fall from first place into fourth. And you could tell that the entire scandal took its toll on her, utterly. She was heartbroken. And Lipinski, Weir, Rippon and the rest – even though they were observing the whole thing from the front row, so to speak – never once thought to turn the lens back on themselves for their role in how she was treated, but pretended they were still disinterested observers who were out for Valieva’s own good. As folk singer John McCutcheon once put it about the death of Princess Diana, the news media and social media were ‘the last to get the message but the first ones on the scene’. There is something very Lewisian – something very That Hideous Strength, to be specific – about the way American politics surrounding sport works nowadays, and the media treatment of Valieva was almost exemplary of that trend.
The experiences of Eileen Gu and of Kamila Valieva in the court of public opinion show this clearly: there are no depths of cruelty to which news media will not sink, when the victim is a woman who belongs to an undesirable nationality or social class not protected by the diktats of the America-centric idpol hierarchy. Weirdly, an Olympic Games in another country has shown that this ain’t no fit place for biracial kids, kids with multiple nationalities, or kids with the wrong nationality, who just can’t win in this nationalism- and idpol-dominated political culture.
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