The 2026 Winter Olympics just concluded in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, showcasing a multitude of sports from figure skating to freestyle skiing. While the Games themselves hosted around 90 countries, highlights from individual sports included multiple successful Asian-American women.
Athletes such as Eileen Gu, Chloe Kim and Alysa Liu have prevailed in their own sports, earning medals from silver to gold throughout multiple Olympics. However, past this success, these individuals have also faced intense public scrutiny about their identity and race.
Eileen Gu may have faced the most tension in front of the news, social media and political figures when she decided to represent China, her mother’s birth country. Being born and raised in the State of California to an American father and Chinese mother, Gu decided to embody both nationalities, expressing that she frequently visited her mother’s home country in the summer.
Her choice to compete for China sparked controversy over her loyalties to the United States. Constantly labeled as a “traitor” and questioning her choices based on her morals, others defended her right to choose based on her diverse background. Aside from being an Olympian, Gu displays success through her undergraduate experience at Stanford University and being a highly paid model for prestigious brands such as Louis Vuitton, Porsche, Tiffany & Co. etc.
Her overall success contributed to her net worth skyrocketing to over $20 million, making her the highest-paid winter Olympic athlete in the world.
With Gu being the most decorated Olympic freestyle skier in history, the backlash received over her success raises the compelling question: Would her nationality choice have generated the same controversy if she hadn’t been so successful?
The fact that Eileen Gu represents two different countries, being half Chinese and half American, should be appreciated, but being as successful as her and seeing so many people express their hatred of her feels like a sense of jealousy.
The whole point of the Olympic Games is to unite people, as Eileen Gu has expressed numerous times. Having this as a headline rather than an individual’s success in sport represents how divided people have become. Even seeing the comparison between Eileen Gu and Alysa Liu butting heads, viewers have picked apart every last aspect of their ethnic backgrounds.
This completely puts them in a sphere, pulls them away from the games themselves, and instills that Asian American women need to “pick a side” when in reality, people can have multiple different heritages and nationalities.
Looking at the two-time Olympic gold medalist Chloe Kim, who competes for Team USA in the snowboard half-pipe, being in the public eye has also made her speak about the racialized harassment she received. Kim describes, in numerous interviews, feeling isolated as a minority in a white-dominated sport. She’s forced to turn off her social media due to receiving death threats, racist messages and harassment towards her family.
When Kim revealed that she was dating Myles Garrett, a defensive end for the Cleveland Browns, her accomplishment at the Winter Olympics diminished when viewers focused solely on her personal relationships. The larger pattern behind this is a problem that has been occurring to many Asian American females, being scrutinized for dating outside of their race.
As a female, Kim expresses that she’s always been fetishized, along with her mom growing up, while her father would receive verbal harassment. The magnitude that individuals carry shows that Asian American women in sports are not political statements; they are not people to be observed under a microscope, but rather, they are well-accomplished people who have trained for years to place in the highest possible position in their sport.
Through resilience and consistent effort, these Asian American women should be praised for their efforts just as much as other Olympic athletes. Raising them to the standard for cultural suspicions and questioning where their loyalty lies completely defeats the purpose of the games and the United States. This is certainly not a time in history to go backwards, and it should be worth considering that these Olympians are human too.
Chloe Kim, Eileen Gu and many others are just a few examples of the backlash that Asian American women receive in many different areas of their lives. The problem affects millions of Asian American women who also have to deal with feeling this way, and seeing this surface in recent news is indicative of saying that something has to change, and that, in order to change, the narrative that people are putting out needs to be reevaluated.