Alysa Liu

Figure skating is sometimes seen as a delicate, ethereal sport, noted for its beautiful costumes, balletic elements, and elegant programs set to classical music. Don’t tell American figure skater Alysa Liu that.

Following her meteoric rise as the youngest U.S. figure skating national champion at age 13, Liu made her Olympic debut at the Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games. Over the course of the next four years, Liu would announce her retirement at age 16, enroll in college as a psychology student, return to the ice on her own terms, and stage the unlikeliest of comebacks that would win her two Olympic gold medals at the Milano-Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games.

The precocious technician

Liu was born in 2005 in Clovis, California, to Arthur Liu, an immigrant from China who sought U.S. protection from government retribution following his involvement in the Chinese Tiananmen Square protests, and an anonymous egg donor. She and her four younger siblings were born through surrogacy. Arthur Liu’s ex-wife Yan (“Mary”) Qingxin has served as a mother figure to Liu and her siblings.

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Her father had an early hand in her skating career, putting her in the rink at age five because of his admiration of skaters including Michelle Kwan. Liu later mentioned she was too young to know her goals coming into the sport, joking, “I made [this big commitment] at five … Who was I at five? I didn’t even know how to spell my name!” Her father served as the manager of Liu’s rigorous schedule, once disguising himself and sneaking into the rink to monitor her practices, and firing her coach when he was dissatisfied with the way Liu was instructed. Arthur Liu invested immense resources into her career. But the extrovert in Alysa was isolated, training and living alone in Colorado from ages 14 to 16: “It was basically his business. It wasn’t even really mine.” Liu thrived in group settings and in the world outside skating. She recalled fondly her experiences sleeping in the same room as her four siblings and training with friends.

In 2019 Liu became the youngest skater to win the U.S. national senior title at just 13 years old. In 2020 she repeated the feat. Her raw talent was undeniable, but the motivation behind it would be interrogated and challenged by Liu over the next few years.

The COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020 changed everything. Rinks closed, except for one located across the country in Delaware, where she sometimes trained despite her misgivings. Instead of slamming jumps and drilling edge work, Liu did what any teenager with access to a surround-sound system would do: blare Billie Eilish from the rink-side speakers and forget about the ice. And when she did get a break from practice, she even found herself hoping the facilities wouldn’t open soon. When the effects of the pandemic subsided, she was back on the ice, perhaps against her own real desires. At this point, Liu entered an Olympic qualifying competition in 2021 and secured herself a spot on the U.S. team.

Olympic effort and a shocking announcement

The 2022 Winter Olympics were the culmination of Liu’s career thus far. While a doping scandal resulted in controversy around the Russian women’s entrants, Liu, undeterred, competed in the image of the perfect female skater. She wore her hair slicked back in a tight bun and donned sparkling but unremarkable costumes that matched her docile programs: orchestral music by Ludwig Minkus and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Liu, at age 16, placed sixth overall. After the Olympics, Liu rallied to win the bronze medal at the 2022 world championships.

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A sixth-place Olympic finish and world senior bronze at age 16 seemed like just the beginning of an incredible career, but it would be the end. Liu shocked the figure skating world by announcing her retirement from the sport on April 9, 2022. Citing satisfaction with her career goals in a characteristically casual Instagram post, she shared that she was looking forward to “moving on with [her] life.” In a later interview, she recalled how exhausted and disconnected she felt from her career. Liu all but disappeared from the world of competitive skating.

Occasional social media updates showed her living a typical life with her friends, a far cry from her isolating and intense Olympic training regimen. After retiring, she got her driver’s license, helped her siblings get to school, and stayed up late hanging out with friends. While finishing high school, Liu was diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a condition that would later inform her personal work ethic and style of learning. After taking a gap year, she enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, to study psychology in 2023. She thought she’d never touch the ice again.

“Back on the ice”

On March 1, 2024, Liu interrupted her normal social media feed with a video simply captioned, “More info soon.” In it, clips from her 2022 Beijing performance are set to calm music. Suddenly, the video cuts to footage of Liu completing several jumps, punctuated by rapper Drake proclaiming the lyrics, “I say whatever I want, yeah / I do whatever I want.” Her retirement was over. But why did she come back? The adrenaline of a ski trip was the spark. “I love this feeling,” Liu stated. “And if skiing feels just like skating, why don’t I just skate?”

She began training again for fun, and then decided to return to the sport on her own terms. Her father was no longer part of her team. She had input on her own coaches, her own music, her own costumes, and her own choreography. Her training style, influenced by her ADHD, could be chaotic, but it was hers. Liu had three options when it came to her sport: skating as she had in the past, not skating at all, or skating as herself. For her, there was only one choice.

A promise to her younger self

Liu’s first official competition after her comeback was the 2024 CS Budapest Trophy. Liu delivered a stunning short program set to “Promise” by Icelandic singer Laufey in an avant-garde dress that resembled bandages. The lyrics of “Promise” seemed especially apt for her return to the ice: “I made a promise / To distance myself…So I broke my promise.” She won the event.

After finishing second at the 2025 U.S. national championships, Liu competed at the 2025 world championships in Boston. “Promise” brought audience members to tears. Her smile and joy were infectious as the American home crowd powered her effusive disco free skate to “MacArthur Park” by Donna Summer. Liu performed flawlessly. As she left the ice, she mouthed to her coaches and the cameras, “What the hell?” A year after coming out of retirement, Alysa Liu was world champion.

Olympic mindset

In an interview leading up to the 2022 Winter Olympics, a younger Liu talked about competing, “I hope to win, obviously. I’d never go into a competition hoping I medal. I always strive for first, even if it’s not possible.” But in an interview with radio station WHYY leading up to the figure skating events in the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milano-Cortina, Italy, Liu demonstrated a matured mindset: “I just personally can’t bring myself to truly care about winning a medal or not.…When I’m enjoying performing, it doesn’t matter what happens.” Her new lip piercing, dyed hair, and willingness to use profanity on the world stage became symbols of her defiance against traditional skating pressures and norms.

At the Olympics, Liu skated a strong short program in the team event, contributing to her first Olympic gold medal. Liu again skated to “Promise” in the individual event, the poignant lyrics—“It hurts to be something / It’s worse to be nothing with you”—seemingly serving as a message to the skater Liu had been and had become. At the end of the short program, she was in third place.

The atmosphere was electric going into Liu’s free skate: It was time to disco. Gone was the tight bun from her childhood, replaced by floppy bangs and stripe-dyed hair in a high ponytail. She took the ice in a gold-sequined dress described by its designer as “flirty fun.” After landing a critical triple loop midway through her program, it seemed that fun was all Liu had on her mind. The rest of the routine was technically flawless, but what made it special was the sassy hair flip here, a cute point-and-wink at the crowd there, and a smile that never left her face and invited the Olympic audience to have as much fun as she was having. Liu recorded her highest score of the season, but now all she could do was wait. There were two skaters standing between her and Olympic gold.

Sakamoto Kaori, a veteran skater from Japan planning to retire after the Games, gave an unapologetic performance as a final punctuation to her career, but a downgraded critical jump combination placed her behind Liu by a few points. Next was bubbly Japanese 17-year-old Nakai Ami in her Olympic debut. She led in the short program with her huge triple axel, but jumping errors in the free skate dropped her total score to third. Alysa Liu was the 2026 women’s individual figure skating Olympic gold medalist.

On her own terms

It became clear that Liu was the breakout star of the Olympics. Her performance and style went viral online, especially among young people in the United States. As much as Liu’s performance transfixed people, it was her message that resonated with millions who saw themselves in her story. Liu’s willingness to talk about the importance of mental health in sport allowed her to set an important example: Removing herself from the expectations of others, leaving when needed, embracing her personal style, and taking the reins of her career led her to her ultimate success and made her a worldwide inspiration.

In August 2026, Liu announced she would not be competing in the upcoming season, saying she wanted to “take the time to recalibrate, fine-tune things & whatnot.”