Eileen Gu’s halfpipe triumph seals historic Olympic status

Monday 23 February 2026 - 13:50

By: Dakir Madiha

Eileen Gu’s halfpipe triumph seals historic Olympic status

Eileen Gu capped her Milan Cortina campaign with a commanding defense of her Olympic freeski halfpipe crown, delivering a 94.75-point final run that secured her sixth career Winter Games medal and confirmed her as the most decorated freestyle skier in Olympic history. The 22-year-old, born in the United States and competing for China, now owns three gold and three silver medals across two Olympics after adding halfpipe gold to her earlier silvers in big air and slopestyle at these Games, building on two golds and one silver from Beijing. In a final marked by rising difficulty and high stakes, Gu recovered from a scrapped opening run to assemble a technically dense second pass, then refined the same line on her last attempt with a towering 900 Buick, linked 900s and 700s, and back-to-back alley-oop flat 540-style spins to lock in the winning score.

Between runs, Gu conferred with her mother in the finish area, later explaining that a reminder of how often she had already landed the run in training helped her reset under pressure and treat the moment with calm rather than anxiety. The gold completed a relentless 16-day program in which Gu competed in all three freeski disciplines, again underlining her rare versatility in an era when most specialists focus on a single event. She remains the only woman to have entered and medaled in all three freeski events at a single Olympics, a benchmark that has reshaped expectations of what is possible in women’s freestyle skiing.

Gu’s celebration was tempered by personal loss, as she revealed in a delayed and emotional press conference that she had just been told of the death of her grandmother, Feng Guozhen, a retired senior engineer from Nanjing whose name she carries in her own. Gu said she had visited Feng before the Games while she was gravely ill and promised not that she would win, but that she would match her grandmother’s resilience by competing with courage and self-belief. She described Feng as a woman who took charge of her life rather than drifting through it, adding that honoring that example on Olympic snow mattered as much to her as the medal itself.

On the podium, China underlined its growing authority in the halfpipe with Li Fanghui taking silver on 93.00, completing a one-two finish for the team and confirming the depth of a program that has become a force in the discipline. Li, the 2025 world silver medalist, built through the final and produced her best run on her last attempt, combining amplitude and difficulty to stay within striking distance of Gu until the closing moments. Great Britain’s Zoe Atkin claimed bronze with 92.50, converting top qualification and an early lead in the final into her country’s first Olympic medal in freeski halfpipe and adding to a family legacy that includes her sister Izzy’s slopestyle bronze at PyeongChang 2018.

For Gu, the victory and the record book entry underscored her role as standard-bearer for her sport at a time when the technical ceiling keeps rising. She acknowledged that she never imagined she would be the athlete pushing those boundaries, but said she feels honored to help lead women’s freeskiing into a new phase while inspiring the next generation to blend ambition with fearlessness.