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Move over Eileen Gu, there’s a new California-born Chinese-American Winter Olympic gold medalist queen of Instagram. And this one represents the red, white and blue.
Team USA’s Alysa Liu reached 5.3 million followers on Instagram on Tuesday, just one week after winning the first individual Olympic gold medal in women’s figure skating in 24 years.
Liu instantly became a global sensation and fan favorite among loyal Team USA fans of all backgrounds and beliefs.
Prior to the start of the Olympics, Liu had less than 300,000 followers on Instagram. But her performance in the women’s final propelled her to worldwide superstardom, as arguably the biggest story of this year’s entire Winter Games.
Meanwhile, Gu, a skiing star who competes for Team China despite being born and raised in the U.S., won a gold medal herself and two silvers. It brought her total Olympic medal tally to six with three golds, making her the most decorated women’s freeskier in the sport’s history.
However, Gu now sits well below Liu in terms of Instagram followers with just 3.7 million. Liu is on pace to potentially double that number.
Prior to the start of the Olympics, Gu had over 2.1 million followers, so she did see a bump. But it could not compare to the meteoric surge for Liu, who is one of the most ascendant figures in all of sports at the moment.
Even Gu herself got involved in the hype over Liu. Gu commented on Liu’s post celebrating the gold medal, cheering her on.
“YESSSSSS,” Gu wrote in the comment section.
The two Chinese-American stars have been relentlessly compared and contrasted on social media this Olympics.
Both athletes are the children of immigrants who came to the U.S. from China. But many fans and critics have been quick to point out the contrast between Liu’s story, a tale of American loyalty by an immigrant’s child, and Gu, who chose to compete for Team China when she was 15 years old despite living in California.
Arthur Liu raised Alysa and her siblings in Oakland. Yan Gu raised Eileen just across the bay in San Francisco.
Their paths diverged in 2019.
The Chinese government launched a program to recruit foreign-born athletes, primarily with Chinese heritage, to boost competitiveness, notably for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics and soccer, according to The China Project.
Gu and Liu were top recruiting targets.
Gu traded in her red, white and blue for red and gold. Just months after competing in her first Freestyle Ski World Cup for the U.S. in January 2019, she competed for China for the first time in June of that year after requesting a change of nation with the International Ski Federation.
The Lius remained loyal to Team USA.
Arthur was reportedly “not open to persuasion” to having Alysa compete for China, according to The Economist.
Liu and her family then found themselves in the crosshairs of China’s government ahead of the 2022 Beijing Games amid her father’s past and her own refusal to compete for China.
Before her appearance in the 2022 Beijing games, she and her father were the alleged targets of a spying operation by the Chinese government.
Liu called the experience “a little bit freaky and exciting.”
“You know what I mean? It’s so … unbelievable. You know what I mean like, that’s crazy,” Liu previously told Fox News Digital at a roundtable interview at the USOPC Media Summit in October.
“Like, imagine finding that out at such a young age, I mean, like In a weird way, I was like, ‘Am I like in some prank show?’ Like, is this world real. Like, I must be some movie character. But, I mean, it was like it made sense to me, you know, from like everything my dad did back in his activist days.”
Both athletes then competed at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, Gu representing China and Liu representing the U.S.
Gu won two gold medals and one silver in freeskiing and went home to California as a new global household name for her success.
Liu finished in sixth place in women’s singles figure skating, then went into a temporary early retirement, before returning to the sport in 2024.
Now, after a successful 2026, Liu has emerged as the more popular figure among the Western world, especially among Americans, and particularly among conservatives.
Many high-profile conservative influencers on social media showered Liu in praising for bringing the historic gold to the U.S., including Megyn Kelly, Clay Travis, Dave Portnoy, and others.
Gu broke down in tears after winning gold in the women’s halfpipe final on Sunday, revealing that her grandmother had died prior to the competition.
It concluded an Olympics in which she had to compete under the pressure of immense global scrutiny in response to her decision to compete for China seven years ago.
Gu was asked if she feels “like a bit of a punching bag for a certain strand of American politics.”
“I do,” she said, according to USA Today. “So many athletes compete for a different country. … People only have a problem with me doing it because they kind of lump China into this monolithic entity, and they just hate China. So, it’s not really about what they think it’s about.
“And also, because I win. Like, if I wasn’t doing well, I think that they probably wouldn’t care as much, and that’s OK for me. People are entitled to their opinions.”
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