It's Tricky

American-born Eileen Gu is the face of China’s winter sports initiative, a sponsor’s dream, and a teenage daredevil who’s being very careful with controversy

- By Ellen Huet, with Sarah Chen and Allen Wan and John Liu

The enormous, curved, gleaming silver building resembles a spaceship that’s come gently to rest in the northwest of Chengdu. It’s July, hot, and humid. Inside the spaceship, though, visitors stifle shivers and watch their breath condense into puffs of vapor. They’re at Sunac Snow Park, a gigantic indoor ski resort that opened in the summer of 2020. The refrigerated complex, built to host about 4,000 skiers and snowboarders, features an artificial hill that slopes upward at least a couple hundred feet, two chairlifts, and three ski runs. There’s also a circular track for ice bicycling (think little bikes on a skating rink) and an open space for ice bumper cars.

China’s citizens have never really showed much interest in skiing. As recently as 1996, the entire country had just six ski resorts. Then winter sports got an official push from the government. In 2015, as part of Beijing’s successful bid to host this year’s Winter Olympics, President Xi Jinping vowed that by the time the games began, China would have 300 million people engaging in winter sports annually. (Something was lost in the translation of the official slogan of the government’s pro-sports campaign: “Three Hundred Million People Enter the Ice and Snow.”) From 2015 to 2020, the number of ski resorts in China rose from 568 to 715, and there are now dozens of indoor facilities like Sunac.

Gu competing in Calgary in 2020