Day after October day, run after run, on a glacier high above town, freestyle skier Eileen Gu spent hours perfecting her tricks in the halfpipe, then on the giant ramps of the slopestyle course next to it. The Winter Olympics in Beijing, where Gu will be one of the biggest stars, win or lose, were still a few months away.

Fly, flip, twist, land; fly, flip, twist, land. Again and again, forging confidence and burning the corkscrewed aerial movements into muscle memory. Then it was straight to the T-bar that dragged her back to the top. The quiet monotony repeated, for weeks through the autumn.