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U.S. Vice President JD Vance broke his silence on the Eileen Gu controversy during a Fox News appearance on Feb. 17, making clear that he expects athletes who benefited from American institutions to compete under the American flag. Gu, a 22-year-old freestyle skier born and raised in San Francisco, has represented China at two consecutive Winter Olympics despite growing up entirely in the United States and currently attending Stanford University.
Vance made his remarks during an interview with Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum on her program The Story. When asked about Gu, he initially demurred on the legal technicalities of her nationality status.
“I don’t know exactly what her legal status is or should be. I think that’s ultimately up to the International Olympic Committee, and I’m not going to second-guess that,” Vance said. He then pivoted sharply.
“But I certainly believe that someone who grew up in the United States, who benefited from our extraordinary educational system, who enjoyed the freedoms and rights that make this country great, should want to compete for the United States,” Vance said. “So I’m going to root for Team USA, and I think part of that is about athletes who identify as Americans. That’s who I’m rooting for in these Olympics.”
The comments thrust the Gu debate back into the center of America’s broader confrontation with China over talent, loyalty, and soft power.
The Olympic Rings are seen in the Village during an Olympic Village Cortina Media Day on day minus three of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games on Feb.3, 2026 in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. (Image: Kevin Voigt/GettyImages)
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Leaked Beijing documents show millions in payments to American-born athletesThe Wall Street Journal reported last week, citing a budget document from Beijing’s municipal sports authority, a CCP-controlled body, that Gu and Zhu Yi, an American-born figure skater also competing for China, received a combined $6.6 million (approximately 47 million yuan) from Beijing in 2025 alone. The regime justified the payments as intended “to secure qualification for the 2026 Milan Winter Olympics and achieve outstanding results,” language that frames state-funded athlete recruitment as routine sports administration. The document was quickly scrubbed from the internet after the Journal’s report.
Over the past three years, total CCP-linked funding for the two athletes may have reached nearly $14 million, according to the Journal. These revelations have intensified longstanding accusations that Beijing is recruiting American-raised athletes as hired talent to enhance its Olympic profile, a practice critics describe as sportswashing, the use of international sporting events to distract from a regime’s domestic repression.
Beyond the state funding, Gu remains the highest-earning Winter Olympic athlete in the world. Forbes estimated that in 2025 alone, she earned $23 million from endorsement deals with both Chinese and Western brands, including Bank of China, Louis Vuitton, and Red Bull.
On the slopes in Milan, Gu has won two silver medals so far, in the women’s freestyle skiing slopestyle and big air events. She failed to defend her 2022 gold medals but remains among the sport’s elite. She is expected to compete in the halfpipe on Saturday, her strongest discipline.
Eileen Gu, the American-born freestyle skier who competes for China, at the slopestyle final on day three of the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, with her mother by her side. (Image: MacNicol/Getty Images)
Two American-raised athletes, two opposite choices
The sharpest contrast at the 2026 Milan Winter Olympics involves two young women who both grew up in the United States with Chinese heritage and arrived at opposite conclusions about whom to represent.
Alysa Liu, a 21-year-old figure skater, is competing for the United States. Her father, Liu Jun, was a student leader during the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movement. He fled to America after the Chinese military’s massacre of unarmed civilians. For Liu, wearing the stars and stripes carries a weight that extends far beyond sport. The U.S. Department of Justice has revealed that CCP intelligence operatives conducted illegal surveillance of Liu Jun and his family on American soil, part of a transnational repression campaign aimed at intimidating the family and pressuring his daughter. Neither father nor daughter yielded. Liu competes under the American flag with a courage that her supporters say transcends athletics.
Gu made the opposite choice. She has never publicly produced evidence that she renounced her American citizenship, as demanded under CCP legal rules that forbid dual nationality, and her name has never appeared on the U.S. Federal Register’s list of individuals who formally gave up their citizenship.
More pointedly, Gu has never spoken publicly about human rights. Despite growing up with every advantage California has to offer, she chose to compete for a regime that has built a network of internment camps in Xinjiang to detain Uyghur Muslims and crushed the democracy movement in Hong Kong. Through all of it, Gu has maintained a calculated silence.
Eileen Gu of Team China reacts after winning the Gold medal during the Women’s Freestyle Freeski Halfpipe Final on Day 14 of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics at Genting Snow Park on February 18, 2022 in Zhangjiakou, China. (Image: Ezra Shaw via Getty Images)
Former NBA star accuses Gu of helping the CCP whitewash its image
Critics say Gu’s insistence that sports and politics are separate spheres rings hollow in an era when authoritarian regimes openly use athletic spectacles to burnish their international reputations.
“You can’t enjoy the freedoms of being an American citizen and simultaneously serve as a global PR tool for the CCP,” wrote Enes Kanter Freedom, a former NBA player and prominent human rights activist, on the social media platform X. Kanter Freedom accused Gu of turning a blind eye to the regime’s abuses, arguing that her silence effectively helps a dictatorship launder its reputation through sport.
The criticism of Gu transcends questions of race or immigration. It centers on a fundamental disagreement over moral accountability: whether an athlete can claim neutrality while accepting millions from a government that operates internment camps, silences dissidents, and crushes democratic movements.
Silver medalist Ailing Eileen Gu of Team People’s Republic of China celebrates on the podium after the Women’s Slopestyle Final on day three of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic games at Livigno Snow Park on Feb. 09, 2026 in Livigno, Italy. (Image: Hannah Peters/Getty Images)
Gu’s commercial success comes at a moral cost, critics say
As Vance’s comments suggest, the Eileen Gu debate is about something larger than passport law. It is a test of what the so-called American Dream actually means.
The real American Dream has never been reducible to getting rich in the United States. It encompasses the embrace of the freedoms, democratic norms, and universal human rights principles that the country was founded to protect. Alysa Liu has earned the respect of the American public for reasons that go beyond her medals. She demonstrated loyalty and resolve in the face of direct threats from an authoritarian state. Her example represents a refusal to bend before coercive power.
Gu, by contrast, has achieved extraordinary commercial success. Yet her gold medals and endorsement income carry a moral cost. When an athlete chooses silence on systematic human rights abuses in exchange for profit, she may win competitions, but she forfeits the respect of those who value freedom.
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