January 31, 2026I'll take her with or without tattoos.
From Althouse,"[Tyra Banks] spends half the docuseries explaining how she was intimately, minutely involved in every brilliant aspect of the show, but her memory suddenly goes foggy..."
Tim O'Brien at PJM explains Why ‘China’s’ Eileen Gu May Be the Most Detested Olympic Athlete Ever
Hans Mahncke @HansMahncke
"... when she’s asked about trash parts. Shandi’s horrific experience in Milan? She didn’t know anything about that, she insists. The blackface? Her unique way of showing that all skin tones were beautiful. The show was just a product of its times, she insists: 'You guys were demanding it.'Were we? I don’t personally recall ringing up Les Moonves to say that I wanted to see 12 young women get knocked over by swinging pendulums and wear dresses made of raw beef, but who can remember — it was a long time ago in the fog of war."
From "We knew ‘America’s Next Top Model’ was cruel. We watched it anyway. Yet another documentary exposes how popular culture failed wwomen 20 years ago. What made this acceptable entertainment?" (WaPo).
Here’s all you need to know about Gu. She was born in San Francisco. Her mother had immigrated to the U.S. from China. She’s a competitive freestyle skier who went to Stanford University in Northern California. In 2019, right before the Wuhan flu took the world by storm, she switched her competitive allegiances from the USA to China. Not that the Olympics and the Wuhan virus are related, but it’s just a reminder that China sucks.
So far this year, she's won two silver medals for China — not what she hoped for. In 2022, in front of a “hometown” crowd in Beijing, Gu won two gold medals and a silver medal for her fellow commies. And according to Scott, she’s filthy rich from skiing:
Making $23 million per year as an “amateur athlete,” in a sport that pays $20,000 annually, while snubbing America to represent a communist country(!) ought to be an Olympic event, too: It requires so many illogical twists, turns, and mental backflips, it’d give Mary Lou Retton vertigo.In her own defense, Gu responded to a question about her performance on the slopes this week and committed a form of media suicide, which in Chinese is called “zì shā.”
Eileen Gu isn’t the first American to take Chinese money: U.S. Navy sailor Jinchao Wei sold military information to China for the princely sum of $12,000 and was sentenced to 16 years in prison. In 2023, Petty Officer Wenheng Zhao was convicted of selling American military secrets to China for less than $15,000.
I'm not all that upset at her. A pro-skier's career tends to be short, and limited by injuries, as Lindsey Vonn has so amply demonstrated. $23 million may seem like a lot, but it might have to last a lifetime. The US will survive the slight.
I think almost everything that can be said about Eileen Gu and Alysa Liu has already been said, but when I step back and look at the full picture, I keep getting blown away by how reality handed us a script far more perfect than anything fiction could invent. On one side, you have the cold, elitist “I’m the most decorated” athlete, raised in one of the wealthiest and most exclusive neighborhoods in the country, Sea Cliff, who gladly sold out the country that gave her everything in order to became the PR face of a brutal dictatorship in exchange for a few suitcases of cash.
On the other side, you have the happy-go-lucky, “That’s what I’m fucking talking about” girl from working-class Richmond, coerced by Communist Party operatives, refusing to bow to them, and proudly representing the United States. And that does not even begin to touch on the tortuous path Alysa’s father had in getting to the United States, compared with the easy route taken by Eileen’s mother, or the many other layers of this story. And then, perfectly, one wins both her competitions and the other loses both. If anyone tried to make a movie out of this story, no one would believe it.
I kind of dig the hair!
No comments:
Post a Comment