Eileen Gu Defending her Crown Athlete Profile

Hi, I'm Eileen Gu, and I am a free skier. I started skiing when I was three years old. My mom put me on the free ski team when I was eight, and that was because I was skiing too fast. She thought it was too dangerous, and the other option was racing. And so she put me into the not racing option, which just happened to be free skiing. She didn't know what it was. She thought it was safer than racing. She was very mistaken. By then it was too late, and I had fallen in love with the sport. As a skier, I like to think of myself as a really good competitor, and I take a lot of pride in that because I think being able to compete well signifies more than being able to ski well. It actually means being able to perform on the day and to be able to ski when the pressure is on. Let's go! The Olympics are the culmination of the highest level of sports. It also is this really unparalleled gathering place for athletes of different countries, different sports, to come together and pretty much exchange culture, exchange stories, and go through this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and experience together. I also definitely, for the Olympics in particular, have a very surreal sense of pieces falling into place, meaning I've been anticipating this moment. I've been using it as fuel for so much of my training, and kind of seeing it actually come to fruition is incredibly surreal. It's like déjà vu, but a hundred times more intense. It feels like a dream, like you're lucid dreaming, but you've been wanting it your whole life and don't dare wake up. I have never been to Livigno, but I actually won my first World Cup in Italy, so I have special memories of my time in Italy. And food, of course. I'm really looking forward to it.