The Promise Before The Gold

If I were to distill it, I would say my grandma was the dreamer. She is the most dauntless, just go-getter optimist that I’ve ever met in my entire life.

When she was my age, she was an electrical engineer at one of the largest copper mines in China at 21, which is crazy. I’m 22 now. And that was in her generation in China, as a woman. She was in the mines, overseeing men in the mines at 20. I can’t even imagine.

Not once has she ever had a victim mentality. Not once has she ever thought, “Oh, it was so difficult. Oh, I was the only woman.” She was like, “Of course. You think they could keep up? Of course, I was the only one who could do it.”

She lost her mother at a very young age, and losing that kind of female force in her life, I just can’t even imagine. And yet, she just went on to become this fierce, fierce woman, and for that I will always, always admire her.

She definitely passed that on to my mom. My mom, I would say, is the efficiency queen. She is the one who will ask, “Okay, how?” She will not do unnecessary suffering. She will not work for the sake of working. She will do the shortest path and the most efficient way to do something with high quality and uncompromising results and attention to detail.

Between the two of them, I think my grandma would set the stage and set the direction, and my mom gave me kind of the toolkit, if you will, to then go on and achieve it.

In that way, I feel like the two of them almost co-parented, formed the basis for these two really complementary parts of me.

My grandma had been sick for a long time, and we knew that there was a chance that it was our last time saying goodbye to her when I left for the Olympics.

So I said all the things that I wanted to say to her. I told her I would be brave for her and made her a bunch of promises essentially.

My mom and I had actually spoken about it, and we’d agreed that if something had happened to my grandma during the Olympics, I didn’t want to know during the contest.

I just cannot believe that my mom knew the whole time during my other events and did not break a sweat or a tear or anything. She was so strong the entire time. It’s her mother.

I actually get her emails. So I checked my phone right after I had won. We hadn’t done the podium ceremony yet. And I saw an email from the funeral home.

I just knew.

My ground was cracking out from underneath me, and it’s like you think your reality is what it is until something just comes along and makes you feel like you were living in a little fishbowl.

I thought the Olympics was the most important single event that I could possibly imagine. I couldn’t think of something that would be more gripping and compelling than that.

All of a sudden, I was like, “This doesn’t matter.”

All of a sudden, the thing that I held to be the epitome of all of life just fell away underneath me. That was very disorienting and extremely earth-shattering.

I took a moment to mourn with my mom, and then we just went to this press conference.

At the very end I wanted to honor her and say, “Hey, by the way, one of the most important people in my life just passed away. I promised her I’d be super brave.”

I wanted to uphold the promises that I made to her, and this was my moment of closure.

I broke down during that.

Jay Shetty: To me, seeing you as a gold Olympic winner, showing both those sides of yourself — your superhuman self and the most human side of you — there’s nothing more powerful. To be superhuman and human in the same breath.

Eileen Gu: That’s my grandma. Just channeling her.