LIVIGNO, Italy (AP) — The two best bets to win the gold medal in women's halfpipe skiing at the Winter Olympics were born in the United States.

Zoe Atkin competes for Britain and hardly anyone raises a fuss about it.

Eileen Gu competes for China and never hears the end of it.

Stories of athletes who lived in one country then decided to compete for another are nothing new to international sports. Throw some Olympic rings on it, then add a high-profile athlete enjoying tremendous success the way Gu has, and it turns into someting messy, even political.

“So many athletes compete for a different country," Gu said after Thursday night's qualifying put her in the mix for her third medal of these Games. “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.”

She was responding to a question stemming from the latest comments that drew her into the headlines: U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance told Fox News earlier in the week he would hope someone who benefitted from growing up in the United States, the way Gu has, would want to compete under its flag.

None of this is new to the 22-year-old Bay Area native, who recognizes she absorbs her share of vitriol not just because she competes for her mother's homeland, but also because of her success both on and off the snow.

Not long after the Olympics are over, Gu will be back in Milan attending a fashion show.

Before that, on Saturday, she will be going for her sixth Olympic medal and trying to make it 3 for 3 at two straight Games. That's something no one else has done since the addition of big air to the program four years ago gave freestyle skiing a third head-over-heels event in the snowpark.

“Like, if I wasn’t doing well, I think that they probably wouldn’t care as much, and that’s OK for me," she said.

After the Olympics, action sports stop caring about countries so much

The Olympic charter says athletes must be a “national” -- a word similar to citizen but with different legal connotations -- of a country to compete for it. Athletes who are nationals of more than one country have to go through a “cooling-off” period if they want to switch, though neither Gu nor Atkin have changed over their Olympic careers.

It is not a surprise: Athletes in freeskiing and snowboarding — two lifestyle sports that champion individuality and are cultivated at X Games, Dew Tours and Burton U.S. Opens where nary a flag can be seen — spend most of their time traveling the globe caring very little about countries or anthems.

“We’re all going to the same place, all traveling together,” said Nick Goepper, the American three-time medalist who competes for his home country. “There’s 25 guys who do this at a high level across the world and it’s better to hang out and mingle with each other, just like people do.”

Besides Vance's comments, a newspaper report about a 2025 document showing the Chinese government funded Gu and another of its athletes to the tune of millions drew headlines at these Olympics. Gu never mentions money when she discusses her reasons for choosing China, instead saying she did it to increase visibility and bring more girls into a sport that wasn't as developed in China as it is in the United States.

“I’ve never received criticism from anybody in the ski industry about any of these decisions,” she said in an interview with The Associated Press last month. “But that’s because I’m friends with all of them.”

Atkin, from Massachusetts, made a choice that flew under the radar

Atkin has enjoyed plenty of success but faces none of the same issues. She is a Massachusetts native who has held dual citizenship since birth. (Gu's citizenship status is another source of constant conjecture, though she has never revealed it.) Atkin's father is British. Like Gu, Atkin attends Stanford.

The 23-year-old, who won last year's world championship, has competed for Britain her entire career. She explained its smaller team has afforded her a chance to train and compete at a pace that works well for her.

“It also has a lot to do with my family and I guess I don't really care what anybody else thinks," she said. "Obviously, we compete for our nation, but at the end of the day, this is an individual sport and I'm trying to do my best show and my best skiing. To me, that's all it's really about.”

Somewhere between Gu and Atkin sits Gus Kenworthy — the halfpipe skier who got famous at the Olympics when he competed for the United States, then kept his career going by signing on with Britain.

He took some flak when he swtiched teams. One reason he did it was because of the perennial depth of the U.S. team. This year, the U.S. placed all four of its men in Friday night's final and left two others with top-10 rankings — including two-time gold and one-time silver medalist David Wise — at home.

“You could be the fifth best person in America, ranked seventh in the world, and still not make the team,” said Kenworthy, who won the silver medal in 2014. “It's great to have all these different countries represented. But sometimes it sucks to be in that position, and I've been in that position.”

That's not the only math that changes when the action-sports world gets tossed into the deep end at the Olympics.

As Gu says frequently and said again Thursday, “people are entitled to their opinions.”

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AP Winter Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics

LIVIGNO, Italy (AP) — American freeskier Hunter Hess got to the end of his successful run in Olympic halfpipe qualifying, then leaned into the camera. He bent his left thumb and forefinger into the shape of an “L," lifted it to his forehead and pointed at it with the other hand.

“Apparently,” he explained, “I'm a loser.”

The 27-year-old who received that label from U.S. President Donald Trump at the start of the Olympics — leading to threats to his family and setting off the first major political imbroglio of the Games — finally got in the starting gate Friday. Fired up after nailing his first run, he flashed the “L” sign, then explained he has used the entire episode as motivation.

“I worked so hard to be here. I sacrificed my entire life to make this happen,” Hess said. “I’m not going to let controversy like that get in my way. I love the United States of America. I cannot say that enough. My original statement, I felt like I said that, but apparently people didn’t take it that way. I’m so happy to be here, so happy to represent Team USA.”

Hess was one of four Americans to qualify for the 12-man final, all of whom have a chance to give the U.S. team its first gold medal over nearly two weeks of skiing and snowboarding at the Livigno Snow Park.

During a news conference at the start of the Games, skiers were asked how they felt representing the country during the Trump administration's heightened immigration enforcement actions back home.

Hess' response: "If it aligns with my moral values, I feel like I’m representing it. Just because I’m wearing the flag doesn’t mean I represent everything that’s going on in the U.S.”

That caught Trump's attention.

“Hess, a real Loser, says he doesn’t represent his Country in the current Winter Olympics. If that’s the case, he shouldn’t have tried out for the Team, and it’s too bad he’s on it,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social account.

After a few days, that died down. The freeskiers, placed on the back end of the Olympic schedule, retreated to Laax, Switzerland, for a week of training. Hess conceded it wasn't the easiest time.

“I had a week that was pretty challenging,” he said. “Luckily, my family was there to support me and help me get through it. There was a lot of noise and I've never been subject to that kind of criticism. Skiing has saved my life time and time again and it seems to have done so again."

He said, "There's been a lot of hate out there. All those people are super entitled to their opinion, and I respect it."

Ultimately, though, he said he had no second thoughts about what he said in that fateful Feb. 6 news conference. The message, he insisted, was really a message of support.

“I stand with what I said. I love the United States of America. I cannot reiterate that enough. It means the absolute world to me to be able to represent Team USA here. I worked so, so hard to get here. I stick with what I said.”

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AP Winter Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics

LIVIGNO, Italy (AP) — Nobody could blame the doctors for telling 13-year-old Jake Canter he should never step on a snowboard again.

Nobody could blame 22-year-old Jake Canter for ignoring them.

Nine years after enduring a traumatic brain injury, the result of getting kicked in the head in a freak accident on a trampoline at an action-sports camp, that 22-year-old U.S. rider won the Olympic bronze medal in his sport's trick-filled trip down the hill — slopestyle.

That third-place finish Wednesday stamped an exclamation point on one of those only-at-the-Olympics kind of stories. It also exposed the flaw in all those dire diagnoses back then: The doctors were looking at Canter's brain when they should have checked his heart.

“I really just hope I made 13-year-old me lying in that hospital bed proud,” Canter said. “This is for him, and everyone who supported me.”

The accident fractured Canter's skull in four places. He ended up in a coma for four days. He lost hearing in his right ear. Six months later, after therapy, some of it on a snowboard, was beginning to help him regain his bearings, Canter felt an earache come on. That was the first symptom of meningitis.

Another coma followed, again for four days. In the end, he needed surgery in which doctors put bone cement in his skull and his right ear, gutting his equilibrium and forcing him to relearn how to walk, how to talk.

But how to snowboard?

“There were only so many people who believed I could go do the stuff I was doing prior to everything," Canter said. "I wanted to prove every doctor wrong that told me I couldn't do this. That's a big part of this.”

Canter's bronze medal did not come on the prettiest day for snowboarding, or for slopestyle.

Twelve riders took three runs each down the course that has been lightly panned all week for a too-big rails section and a trio of jumps that are tightly bunched together, making it harder for the athletes to gather speed and throw their biggest tricks.

So when Canter, facing an all-or-nothing gamble for the podium on his third and final run, threw the day's only 1980-degree spin off the last jump, it made for compelling theater. When he landed it, things got better.

He thrust his arms to the heavens and snapped his goggles off. He screamed “Let's Go!” then went to snowboarding's version of the “Kiss and Cry” area.

Judges took a full three minutes evaluating that run to see if it belonged on the podium. The score came up; they agreed it did. Su Yiming of China won gold while Taiga Hasegawa of Japan took silver.

About an hour later, Canter told the story of the traumatic brain injury and ticked off some other injuries — compound fractures to his right arm and a broken left hand that he rode with at the Olympics.

Not all of them have involved bones and fractures.

He told of a snowboarding friend who died from suicide in 2021. Canter, who grew up in the mountains of Colorado, has that friend's birthday tattooed on his left wrist.

“I didn't have a car at the time, he'd drive 45 minutes out of his way, take me to the resort,” Canter said. “We spent a lot of time traveling together when we were younger. So, this is a special win for him.”

Canter conceded that so much trauma over such a short life has taken its emotional toll. Mental health, a topic that has gained traction in Olympic circles in recent years, is something he's fine talking about. Sometimes, to get away from it all, therapy involved simply getting on a board and riding.

“It’s the freedom it gives you, because you’re in control,” Canter said. “I can express myself a lot through my snowboarding. I feel more myself when I’m on my snowboard, as well.”

On a magical day in Italy, snowboarding gave him yet another gift — maybe brought a few new fans along for the ride, too.

“I'm so lucky to be standing up here, and I'm showcasing my skills to the world,” he said. “And this is the biggest stage to do it.”

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AP Winter Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics