Us-born Chinese freeskier Eileen Gu wins Olympics silver with wafer-thin margin

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com.

If Eileen Gu’s latest performance is best gauged by how she came through big under pressure, or how she somehow keeps balancing three different and difficult events with the demands of her burgeoning celebrity, then her high-wire act Tuesday at the Olympics must have felt like a victory.

The second-place finish she "settled for" after all those harrowing trips down the slopestyle course — it was more a matter of opinion than a loss.

LIVE UPDATES: BEIJING OLYMPICS

After the nine Olympic judges perched above the rails and jumps formed their opinions and placed numbers next to them, the U.S.-born Olympic daredevil, competing for her mother's homeland of China, found herself a scant .33 points behind the winner, Mathilde Gremaud of Switzerland.

The final score — 89.56-89.23 — is about as close as you’ll get on a 100-point scale. It’s the equivalent of losing a 100-meter sprint by .03 seconds. Those contests aren’t judged. These ones are. Gu knows as well as anyone that some things in her sport are simply out of her control.

"I trust the judges," she said. "Sometimes they give it to you and sometimes they don’t, and today they didn’t."

Silver medal winner China's Eileen Gu celebrates during the venue award ceremony for the women's slopestyle finals at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2022, in Zhangjiakou, China.  (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)

That it came down to this was in part because, Gu conceded, she "wasn’t really in the zone" at the start of this minus 5 degree F (minus 20 degree C) morning in the mountains above Beijing.

Even for an 18-year-old with as much energy as she has followers, what she’s doing is exhausting. Where most