Link: https://www.bbc.com/sport/articles/cvg3p0lzx56o

Wherever Eileen Gu goes, her fans will follow. Headlines will too.

With five medals - and the opportunity for one more on Saturday - she is the most decorated female Olympic freestyle skier in history.

But she is also someone who transcends her sport, a 22-year-old global superstar with a bank balance to make your eyes water.

China fell in love with its 'snow princess' at the Beijing 2022 Olympics where, as the poster girl of the Games, she duly delivered.

She became freestyle skiing's youngest Olympic champion with her big air and halfpipe golds at the age of 18, and the first to win three medals at the same Games when she added slopestyle silver.

Later that year, she was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world.

"I just like being the best. I've always wanted to do that," said Gu at the Milan-Cortina Olympics, where she has added two more silver medals to her Olympic collection.

"I wanted to be the best at math when I was in kindergarten, and then I wanted to get into the best high school, and I wanted to have the highest SAT score, and then I wanted to get to the best college, and I wanted to be the best skier I could be.

"Then I wanted to do every event, and then I wanted to win them all. When you get a taste of it, it's kind of addictive."

On and off skis, Gu is a high achiever in every part of her world.

California-born and raised by an American father and Chinese mother, she attended private school in San Francisco and is currently taking a sabbatical from her studies at Stanford University, where she majors in international relations and previously studied quantum physics.

She is also fluent in Mandarin, and as a child would spend summers in Beijing.

"Sometimes it feels like I'm carrying the weight of two countries on my shoulders," Gu said earlier in the 2026 Games.

In 2019, at the age of just 15, she switched her sporting allegiance from the US to China, wanting to "inspire millions of young people in Beijing - my mother's birthplace" before the 2022 Olympics.

Whatever her reasoning, it was a decision that proved lucrative.

In December, Forbes ranked Gu as the fourth-highest paid female athlete for 2025, behind only tennis players Coco Gauff, Aryna Sabalenka and Iga Swiatek.

But unlike those three, only a tiny amount of her $23.1m (£17.1m) income last year came from prize money from her sport - around $100,000 (£74,000).