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Move over Eileen Gu, 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 a week after winning the nation’s first individual Olympic gold medal in women’s figure skating in 24 years.
Liu became an instant global sensation and fan favorite among loyal Team USA fans of all backgrounds and persuasions.
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Gold medalist Alysa Liu of the United States displays her medal after competing in the women’s free skate program in figure skating at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan, Italy, Thursday, Feb. 19, 2026. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
Before 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, arguably the biggest story of this year’s Winter Games.
Meanwhile, Gu, a skiing star who competes for Team China despite being born and raised in the United States, won a gold medal and two silvers herself. It brought her Olympic medal total to six with three golds, making her the most decorated women’s freeskier in the history of the sport.
However, Gu now sits well below Liu in terms of Instagram followers with only 3.7 million. Liu is on track to potentially double that number.
Before the start of the Olympics, Gu had over 2.1 million followers, so she saw a bump. But it couldn’t compare to the meteoric rise of Liu, who is one of the most rising figures in all of sports at the moment.
Even Gu got involved in the hype about Liu. Gu commented on Liu’s post celebrating the gold medal and cheered 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 children of immigrants who came to the United States from China. But many fans and critics have been quick to point out the contrast between Liu’s story, a tale of American loyalty from the child of an immigrant, and Gu, who chose to compete for Team China when she was 15 years old despite being alive. in California.
Arthur Liu raised Alysa and her siblings in Oakland. Yan Gu raised Eileen just across the bay in San Francisco.
Their paths parted in 2019.
The Chinese government launched a program to recruit foreign-born athletes, primarily of Chinese heritage, to boost competitiveness, particularly for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics and soccer, according to The China Project.
Gu and Liu were top recruiting targets.
Gu traded his red, white and blue for red and gold. Just months after competing in her first Freestyle Ski World Cup for the United States in January 2019, she competed for China for the first time in June of that year after requesting a change of nationality with the International Ski Federation.
The Lius remained loyal to Team USA.
FBI agent, Alysa Liu, Chinese military (Maddie Meyer/Getty Images, Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images, PHILIPPE LOPEZ/AFP via Getty Images)
Arthur was reportedly “not open to persuasion” to have 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.
Prior to her appearance at the 2022 Beijing Games, she and her father were the alleged targets of a spy 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, it’s crazy,” Liu previously told Pakinomist 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 on a prank show?’ Like, this world is real. I must be a movie character. But I mean, it kind of made sense to me, you know, from like everything my dad did back in his activist days.”
Both athletes then competed at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, Gu representing China and Liu representing the United States
Gu won two gold medals and a silver in freeskiing and went home to California as a new global household name for his success.
Liu finished sixth in women’s figure skating, then took 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 especially among conservatives.
Many high-profile conservative social media influencers praised Liu for bringing the historic gold to the United States, 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 ahead of the competition.
It ended an Olympics in which she had to compete under the pressure of enormous global scrutiny in response to her decision to compete for China seven years ago.
Gu was asked if she feels “like a little of a punching bag to a certain part of American politics.”
“I do,” she said, according to USA Today. “So many athletes compete for another country … People only have a problem with me doing that 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’m winning. If I didn’t do well, I think they probably wouldn’t care and that’s ok with me. People are entitled to their opinions.”
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