Skier Eileen Gu exploded into the spotlight after winning Olympic gold at the 2022 Beijing Games—and was just 18 years old at the time. But the 21-year-old recently took a few months off from her sport after suffering an injury.
Now, Eileen is back and crushing the competition. Up next for her are the X Games, which are taking place in late January.
But what happened with Eileen’s injury and how is she doing now? Here’s what she’s shared.
Did Eileen Gu get injured?
Eileen suffered a knee injury during the 2022-2023 season from a crash during training. As a result, she withdrew from the X Games that year.
“Had a heavy crash today in training and was told by doctors that they were worried about my ACL,” she wrote in a January 2023 Instagram post. “Had the most agonizing couple hours waiting to get an MRI until I finally got my results back about 30 mins ago. Turns out my knee is intact!! So so lucky to be walking away with a bad MCL sprain, ACL strain, and bone bruise.”
Eileen added that “the last few hours really put everything in perspective and made me realize how important it is to keep my body healthy. I’ll be back soon.”
She spent her recovery exploring the fashion world.
Eileen didn’t sit around and twiddle her thumbs during recovery. Instead, she focused on her studies at Stanford University, walked the runway at fashion shows, and did plenty of magazine photoshoots, per Olympics.com. She’s even attended the Met Gala multiple times.
“I really love having a multifaceted life,” she said. “I think that being a full-time student, being a full-time model and a full-time professional athlete have really all contributed to different parts of one another.”
Focusing on other interests helped Eileen feel “strong and confident,” both on and off the slopes.
“Being in school has informed the way that I learn and that I deal with pressure in skiing,” she continued. “Skiing… is helping to build a new narrative around beauty, not only what your body looks like, but also what it can do.”
She’s trained ‘like there’s no tomorrow’ to return.
But Eileen worked really hard to get back to the sport that she loves. “I’m kind of notorious in training because I train like there’s no tomorrow,” she told CNN in 2024. “I’ll be lapping people in training, I’ll do my full run like three runs in because that’s, I know, the way that I work.”
Eileen was feeling so much better that she even ran her first marathon in August at the Paris Olympics 2024 Mass Participation Marathon.
“Sub 3:25 first marathon !!! Talk 2 meeeeee 🤯,” she wrote on Instagram.
In 2024, she took home X Games gold.
After her injury, Eileen came back swinging, winning gold in the 2024 X Games superpipe event. But she suffered another injury right before the competition, going through a crash and hip injury three days before her event.
“I could barely walk and was skiing with an unprecedented level of pain,” she said on Instagram at the time. “I had to dig deep for this one.”
Luckily, Eileen seems happy and healthy these days—can’t wait to see what comes next for her!
Korin Miller is a freelance writer specializing in general wellness, sexual health and relationships, and lifestyle trends, with work appearing in Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Self, Glamour, and more. She has a master’s degree from American University, lives by the beach, and hopes to own a teacup pig and taco truck one day.
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