Gus Kenworthy, a retiring, British-born skier raised in Colorado, was the one athlete at the Beijing Olympics who had the guts to stand up to the Chinese Communist Party while still on inhospitable snow.

The openly gay freestyle skier and Telluride High 2010 grad competed for his native United Kingdom at these Olympics, his last, after skiing for Team USA for a decade. He won a silver medal at the 2014 Sochi Games in Russia.

Unlike American-born skier Eileen Gu, who chose China – a nation that doesn’t grant dual citizenship – over the U.S., Kenworthy retained dual citizenship in skiing for the U.K. And he relinquished a spot on the U.S. team to young, up-and-coming skiers – such as Winter Park’s Birk Irving – who hadn’t competed at the Olympics before.

While repping Team USA at the 2018 South Korean Olympics, the ever-personable, down-to-earth Kenworthy advocated in support of gay athletes for the rest of the world to see – namely, the very communist country, China, set to host the next Olympics in 2022.

On Saturday, before his final competition, the candid Coloradan tried his best to play the same cautious public-relations game thousands of athletes stuck to while in the communist state. Saying he’d been advised to “tread lightly,” Kenworthy told The Associated Press, “we’re in China, so we play by China’s rules. And China makes their rules as they go, and they certainly have the power to kind of do whatever they want: Hold an athlete, stop an athlete from leaving.”

Kenworthy then dropped into his last halfpipe contest, a disaster he and other skiers never should have experienced. Beijing 2022 officials refused to postpone the event despite dangerous gales in subzero temperatures.

Kenworthy was one of several skiers, Crested Butte’s Aaron Blunck another, who suffered scary multistory falls onto the compacted snow. Kenworthy’s was the worst, a high-impact horror crash after which he said he was just “happy to be walking.”

Licking his wounds post-event, Kenworthy unleashed. He not only criticized China for their “human rights atrocities,” cyber-snooping of athletes, lack of transparency with COVID-19 testing and “poor stance” on gay rights. He also, indirectly, called out athletes complicit in trying “to appeal to the masses.”

“I’m just gonna speak my truth,” he said.

Kenworthy’s truth is the kind that increasingly isn’t permitted in China. Eight months ago, a coming-out post from lesbian Chinese soccer star Li Ying on Weibo, China’s heavily censored version of Twitter, was mysteriously deleted.

It came amid bleak 2020 and 2021 Pride Months in China, as the nation’s biggest festival, Shanghai Pride, was canceled. Other events were forced underground, and dozens of gay-rights accounts last summer were deleted from the popular messaging app WeChat.

China’s gay-rights crackdown is rooted in the Cultural Revolution half a century ago. Today, CCP leaders such as President Xi Jinping have developed a domineering, despotic doctrine to rid any “nonsocialist” elements – homosexuality included – from Chinese society.

The 2022 Beijing Games didn’t have a comparable moment to the one at the Berlin Olympics, in 1936, when African American Jesse Owens dominated in front of Adolf Hitler’s dystopian Nazi regime.

Still, we Coloradans can take pride in how it was one of us, Kenworthy, who wasn’t afraid to speak his truth in the face of tyranny.

Colorado Springs Gazette editorial board