Gu Ailing.
You may still be unfamiliar with the name today. In three months' time at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, she will be a strong candidate for the Chinese freestyle ski team to compete for the championship.
Double-board freestyle ski genius, Stanford school bully, model who has been invited to fashion week many times, gold-winning hit at the Beijing Winter Olympics... Gu Ailing lived simply the open life of the big heroine of Shuangwen.
Oh yes, she just turned 18 this year.
How good is the ski genius Gu Ailing? How did her open life come about?
Let's start with her upbringing.
In 2003, Gu Ailing was born in the United States. The father is American and the mother is Chinese.
At the age of 3, she was first taken to the resort's ski slopes by her mother, and more than a year later, the little girl who was not as tall as the snowboard had learned to grab the board, jump and other skills. At that time, Gu's mother had to pay special attention to her daughter, and if Xiao Ailing fell, she might have to find it in the snowdrift for a while.
At the age of 7, she has become the only girl to be selected for the ski professional team;
At the age of 9, she made her debut in competition, was noticed by professional ski instructors, and later became the champion of the American Snowboarding and Freesleigh Junior Association, starting to fight monsters and upgrade all the way in the snow world.
At the age of 15, she won her first world championship. At the Free Ski World Cup in Italy and Canada, she won her first Grand Slam.
A few months later, she announced that she would be competing for China. That means she'll switch to Chinese nationality, and the 15-year-old once received death threats on social media.
At the age of 17, Gu Ailing entered the peak year of her career. Won two golds and one bronze at X Games, the world's highest level, recognized as the highest level. Subsequently, the World Championships won two golds and one bronze, becoming a recognized hit for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games.
Friends who don't know how skiing is probably not aware of how amazing such an achievement is.
Freestyle skiing is a very dangerous race, and there are many accidents in the competition. High-profile competitions like XGames and the World Championships are already very top-notch world-class athletes as long as they can win a gold medal. At the age of 17, Gu Ailing took four gold medals alone, and two bronze medals in other projects.
This allowed her to create several firsts – the first Chinese athlete to win gold at the World Extreme Games, the first to compete in the XEL Freestyle Ski U-Shaped Track Competition for the first time, and the first rookie woman to take 2 gold medals when she participated in the Winter Extreme Games for the first time.
What is even more surprising is that the ski career is just a fragment of Gu Ailing's 18-year-old life.
It wasn't until this year that she submitted an application for suspension and temporarily switched to full-time athletes to concentrate on preparing for the Beijing Winter Olympics.
Until then, she only had to train every weekend. The nearest ski slope is four hours from her home in the United States, and she has to finish her homework in those four hours and then spend all her remaining time skiing. Oh yes, to make time for her training, she was the first student in high school to graduate a year early.
At the same time, she did not rely on athletic specialties, scored a near-perfect score of 1580 on the SAT test, that is, the American college entrance examination, and was admitted to the coveted Stanford University.
The titles of "Chinese professional skier" and "Stanford Scholar" alone are not enough to summarize Gu Ailing.
Trail running, basketball, equestrianism, gymnastics, dance, rock climbing, table tennis... Gu's mother always had three sets of clothes in her car, one set of clothes to play football, one set of clothes to play piano ballet, and another set of clothes to wear at school.
When it comes to the holidays, she will return to Beijing with her mother, saying that Chinese, playing table tennis, stringing hutongs, running in Chaoyang Park...
She's even a part-time model. At the age of 15, she appeared at Paris Fashion Week, and Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Cosmopolitan and Vogue all had her face on the covers.
In the face of the infinite possibilities of life, Gu Ailing now focuses all her energy on one thing, the Beijing Winter Olympics in February 2022. She wants more than just a good result, but also to break down the prejudice that women participate in extreme sports.
Freestyle skiing is an extremely ornamental and dangerous sport. Taking the ramp obstacle course as an example, athletes need to slide down the ramp with a height of more than 150 meters, compete on the track composed of various obstacles such as railways, tables, and boxes, and rotate through more than 3 jumps, which is equivalent to constantly jumping down from a height of 30 meters and turning.
It is precisely because of the high difficulty and danger that some people always think that women's freestyle skiing is not as good as men's, or women are not suitable for this sport. Gu Ailing, on the other hand, spoke with his achievements and faced the doubts of the outside world. In the steeplechase where she won the gold medal, she could use the difficulty of turning 450 degrees to score, which is the difficulty that only a world-class male player can do.
She wanted to tell everyone with her own voice: "It's not that women are not suitable for extreme sports, but because the number of women involved is not enough, and they can't see similar people in life, everyone will find it difficult." ”
"If I can do it, then everyone can."
This is also one of the important reasons why she decided to represent China at the age of 15. Let a new generation of women see the possibilities of winter sports in China and let more people enjoy skiing. In Beijing, in my mother's hometown, in a place where I grew up spending summer vacations, fulfilling my childhood dream of participating in the Winter Olympics, nothing makes more sense.
Let's look forward to this 18-year-old talented girl to achieve another good result and bring us surprises at the Beijing Winter Olympics!
The flame of the Winter Olympics has been passed to Beijing. As the first city to host both the Summer Olympic Games and the Winter Olympic Games, Beijing will once again usher in the glory of the Olympic Games and carry forward the competitive sportsmanship of "faster, higher, stronger and more united".
In less than three months, the Beijing Winter Olympics will officially open. Winter sports competitions in 7 major events, 15 sub-events and 109 minor events are about to begin.
Here secretly tell everyone that Douyin has invited Gu Ailing, Dayang Yang, Wu Dajing, Wang Meng and many other Winter Olympic athletes to settle in. They will also share their training lives on Douyin and chat with everyone about the Winter Olympics in the live broadcast room.
In the next three months, we will continue to bring you the knowledge of winter Olympic sports projects and athletes in the headline number of "Douyin and Ta Friends", and welcome everyone's attention.
Come to Douyin and watch the Winter Olympics together!