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Eileen Gu wins gold for America

In the immediate moments after she did the impossible, there were no words from Eileen Gu. Raised in San Francisco and competing for China, there didn’t need to be a language. There were screams, and there were tears.

Gu, the supermodel who is perhaps the most fascinating star of these Beijing Games, became the youngest freestyle skiing gold medalist in Olympics history with an incredible jump in her third and final try that vaulted her from third to first Monday night.

She entered her final jump in position to medal — athletes are judged on their two best scores, so she was playing with house money — and needed to pull off a trick she had never done to have a shot at gold.

She closed her eyes, visualized what had never occurred, and skied down the 200-foot big air structure before catapulting herself off and completing 4 ¹/₂ spins — a 1620. In doing so, she became the second woman to complete the trick in competition.

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