""There's this thing called post-Olympic depression, and it's like, very common among athletes, a pretty well-known phenomenon. But the interesting thing is, it's not at all correlated to results," Gu said in a June 2025 episode of The Burnouts podcast hosted by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni. "That's what's kind of surprising to people, is like, you can win the Olympics and still just enter the deepest rut of your life and just really be questioning everything, your purpose.""
""[You] feel so burnt out, but at the same time just have all this anxiety and pent up energy, not sure where to direct it," she continued. "And I was no exception.""
Eileen Gu experienced severe burnout, anxiety, and post-Olympic depression after winning two golds and one silver at the 2022 Winter Olympics at age 18. Post-Olympic depression commonly affects athletes and does not correlate with competition results. Gu felt burnt out yet anxious with pent-up energy and an uncertain sense of purpose. At 22, Gu is the youngest Olympic champion in freestyle skiing, attends Stanford with a 1580 SAT score, models as a founding member of Victoria's Secret's VS Collective, appears on Time's cover, and earns $23 million annually from endorsements while competing for China.
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