A number of events at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics have already kicked off ahead of tomorrow’s Opening Ceremony. Despite a lead-up to the Games that has been dominated by headlines depicting controversy and politics, there are some intriguing sporting storylines taking shape, and we’ll be glued to the TV screen over the next three weeks to watch them play out.
Here are five of the (many) athletes we’ll be watching, and the stories behind their arrival in Beijing.
Eileen Gu
If you’re not yet familiar with the name Eileen Gu, we can almost guarantee that you will be by the end of these Games. The American-born freeskiing prodigy shocked the ski world in 2019 when, just five days after winning her first World Cup gold medal with the U.S. Ski Team, she announced her defection to the Chinese team to represent her mother’s country of birth.
“The opportunity to inspire millions of young people where my mom was born, during the 2022 Beijing Olympic Winter Games is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help to promote the sport I love,” she wrote on her Instagram page.
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At just 18 years old, Gu is already a multi Winter X Games and World Championships gold medallist, and a genuine chance to top the podium in all three of her events in Beijing: the women’s big air, slopestyle and halfpipe.
Regardless, she’ll have plenty of other talents to fall back on if she ever walks away from skiing. The overachieving teen is already a highly successful model working with brands like Victoria’s Secret and Louis Vuitton, and will be beginning college at Stanford later this year as part of the class of ’26.
Jamaican Bobsled Team
“Jamaica we have a bobsled team!”
Every kid who grew up in the ’90s will likely be cheering for the Jamaican Bobsled team, who have qualified for the Winter Olympics in the 4-man event for the first time since 1988 – the year that inspired the cult film Cool Runnings.
The team’s preparation for Beijing appears to have been amusingly similar to the training scenes we witnessed in the 1994 movie, although they’ve had the pandemic to blame this time around, with lockdowns forcing gyms to close during periods of the lead-up.
“I had to create a home gym in my garden,” Shanwayne Stephens, a bobsled pilot said. “Pushing a car up and down the street to get a sort of distance training done.”
“We’ve had people run over, thinking the car’s broken down, trying to help us bump-start the car. When we tell them we’re the Jamaica bobsleigh team, the direction is totally different, and they’re very excited,” he told Yahoo Sports.
Jokes aside, the team will be in Beijing to show their ability as athletes and go a step further than their countrymen from the 1988 team.
“We love that they love the movie, but we want that focus to shift from the movie to us being competitive athletes out to win medals,” Stephens said. “If we can do that with this Olympics, then I think the combination of us being competitive athletes and the movie will spark a massive shift and love for Jamaica bobsled and Jamaica as a whole.”
Mikaela Shiffrin
At just 26, Mikaela Shiffrin is already one of the greatest skiers of all time – a 2-time Olympic gold medallist, 3-time Overall World Cup Champion, with a staggering 73 World Cup race wins to her name (the third most ever).
In Beijing, Shiffrin will aim to top the podium in all five individual events: the giant slalom, the slalom, the super-G, the downhill and the alpine combined, and pundits are confident in her ability to bring multiple golds back to the U.S..
But the weight of expectation is something that Shiffrin has addressed in detail, admitting that parts of her experience in Pyongchang were “really pretty stressful and uncomfortable”.
“It’s not like rainbows and sunshine and butterflies and everything that people sort of say,” Shiffrin told reporters.
“They’re like, ‘Wow, that looks like it was so much fun!’ And you’re like, ‘Well, it was fun to cross through the finish line and, in the next five seconds, see the green light (signalling the fastest time) and comprehend that.”
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Shiffrin’s struggles off the ski slopes have been well publicised – in particular the hardship of losing her father in 2020 and the impact it had on her career (she took time away from the sport). Only recently, her Olympic preparation was derailed as she became one of many high profile athletes to test positive for COVID-19, which she has since recovered from fully.
In an interview with the Washington Post, Shiffrin revealed that getting to Beijing would be a huge relief (“I might be able to take a breath, finally’, she said).
We’ll be watching and hoping for the best.
Arif Khan
Speaking of the weight of expectation…
Arif Khan will feature in Beijing as the sole representative from India, a country of 1.38 billion people. The 31-year-old alpine skier, who will compete in the men’s slalom event, is from the Indian-administrated side of Kashmir and learnt to ski at Gulmarg ski resort, where his father owns a ski shop.
His route to Beijing has been far from ordinary. To qualify, Khan had to crown-fund his trips to Europe, raising SG$8,449 ($US6,721) on the platform GoGetFunding for the chance to “take part and win at the Winter Olympics 2022 in China”.
The page reads: “The journey for Arif has been of extreme hardships which includes growing up in a troubled area, practically no funds from the government and non-existent Ski association in India. Despite all of this and more, he has achieved so much. However, to go beyond this he needs international coaches, diet, equipment, travel cost etc. and given the background of his only source of income which has become grimmer with dwindling tourism to Kashmir.”
Even more interestingly, Khan’s qualifying run eventually came at a GS event held at Ski Dubai, an indoor ski slope located inside a shopping mall in the UAE.
“It was the first time they held an international competition, and I was invited. Three of us actually ended up qualifying for the Olympics,” he says in a media interview. “And people were watching through a window from the mall!”
Whether or not Khan can get anywhere near his lofty goal of medalling at the Games is anyone’s guess. But we’ll enjoy watching final stages of his Olympic story nonetheless, and we suspect there were be many others (1.38 billion, to be exact) watching alongside us.
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