LIVIGNO, Italy — In a dramatic display of athletic resilience, freestyle skiing superstar Eileen Gu secured her fifth Olympic medal with a silver performance in big air—an event she hadn’t contested in four years. The 20-year-old Stanford student, competing for China, finished just 1.75 points behind Canadian champion Megan Oldham in Monday’s final.
The victory marked a spectacular comeback for Oldham, who recovered from a December concussion to land the gold-medal performance. The 24-year-old from Ontario credited her background in gymnastics and figure skating for developing the aerial awareness needed to master big air’s death-defying maneuvers.
Gu’s journey to the podium was particularly remarkable given her limited preparation. She learned her competition trick merely four days prior and suffered a helmet-cracking crash during warmups when attempting an even more complex 1620-degree spin. A 75-minute weather delay provided critical recovery time that Gu acknowledged was essential to her medal-winning performance.
Italian skier Flora Tabanelli completed the podium with bronze, an achievement made extraordinary by competing just four months after tearing her ACL while wearing a brace instead of undergoing season-ending surgery.
For Gu, the silver adds to her historic Olympic collection that now includes five medals across two Winter Games—more than any female freestyle skier in history. Despite the narrow margin, she rejected any narrative of disappointment, emphasizing that winning five Olympic medals represents an “exponentially hard” accomplishment.
The competition now shifts to halfpipe, where Gu has dominated with 15 World Cup victories. With just two training days before Thursday’s qualifying round, the multi-event athlete embraced the challenge with what she calls “goldfish mode”—quickly forgetting one competition to focus entirely on the next.