Eileen Gu is one of the best skiers in the world.
The San Francisco native won two golds and a silver medal at the 2022 Beijing Games, and she’s already defended her silver medal at her first event at this year’s Winter Olympics.
Gu has been open about how she feels like she represents two countries when competing in the Olympics: the United States of America and China.
Both countries are dear to Gu, but she had to choose before her first Olympics four years ago which country she wanted to represent on the grandest stage.
In 2019, after competing for Team USA, she made the official and final switch to China. Although she made that difficult choice, Gu still decided to attend Stanford University, a school close to her home, while competing across the world for China.
Gu is already one of the highest-paid Olympic athletes, Winter or Summer, in the world, with a slew of sponsorships in China and the USA.
But recently, the Wall Street Journal learned how much China was paying Gu to compete on its behalf on the global stage.
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“In 2025, the Beijing Municipal Sports Bureau was set to pay Gu and another athlete a combined $6.6 million,” wrote Rachel Bachman. “That figure emerged in a public budget that was released in early 2025. It accidentally included the names of Gu and figure skater Zhu Yi or Beverly Zhu, another U.S.-born Olympic athlete who competes for China.”
While the entire $6.6 million is split, Gu, who has millions of social media followers and is one of the main faces of the Games, can be safely assumed to get the vast majority of the money.
During the Milan Games, Gu has already spoken out about the pressure she feels to perform as she has the weight of two countries on her shoulders.
If qualification goes well on Saturday, the Chinese-American skier will have an opportunity to win her first gold of this year’s Olympics in the women’s big air competition on Monday.
