Eileen Gu Was Raised by Her Super-Accomplished Single Mom Yan

If you know anything about the Winter Olympics or professional skiing, the name Eileen Gu should definitely ring a bell. That’s because she’s one of the highest-paid female athletes, pulling in around $23 million a year, according to The New York Times, and she’s only 22 years old.

Eileen’s skills and earnings are impressive, no doubt, but anyone who reaches that level of success and wealth leaves a lingering question: who are her parents? Because they must have helped her get there, right? Well, we can say that Eileen’s mom certainly supported her journey to the Olympics, but her dad… well, that might be a different story. Here’s everything we know about Eileen’s parents, which helps explain why her nationality is hard to pin down.

Eileen Gu is the daughter of Yan Gu, who is of Chinese descent, and an American father who remains unidentified. Yan Gu emigrated to the U.S. from China in her 20s, according to Forbes, and began building quite the impressive resume. Not only did she study biochemistry at Rockefeller University in New York, but she also earned her MBA at Stanford.

Before earning her MBA, Yan dabbled in skiing at Hunter Mountain, which essentially sparked her love for the sport and eventually led her to get Eileen involved in it.

After Yan’s first ski at Hunter Mountain, she got more serious about skiing and decided to enroll her daughter in ski school in Lake Tahoe. Her passion, and presumably her talent, helped Eileen become one of the most widely known skiers today, not to mention a beacon of hope and inspiration for fellow skiers in China.

So it seems Eileen got her smarts, and her passion for skiing, from her mom, who is credited with raising her.

While Yan says she “accidentally created a pro skier,” according to Forbes, skiing is only one of the many things Eileen is good at.

She nearly scored a perfect SAT score and was accepted early into Stanford, and she’s also a professional model, having been featured in the Chinese editions of major magazines like Elle, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar. We should also mention she’s fluent in both Mandarin and English, making her essentially one of the most well-rounded athletes out there.

It doesn’t seem so. According to The New York Times, Eileen’s dad is American and graduated from Harvard, so maybe she got her smarts from both her parents. However, there’s really no trail of him being involved in her life, and she doesn’t speak about him publicly. Maybe he’s involved behind the scenes, or maybe not. Either way, it’s all pretty hush-hush when it comes to Eileen’s dad.

Despite that, she seems to have had a solid upbringing. She was raised in San Francisco’s Sea Cliff neighborhood, per the The New York Times, with her mother and grandmother, Feng Guozhen. Eileen seems very aware of the impact the women in her life have had on her. In a March 2021 Instagram post, she gave a shoutout to her mom and grandmother, along with other women in her life, for making her “who I am today.”