She was a national champion at 13, retired at 16, came back to win a world championship at 19. Is Olympic gold next?
You wouldn’t expect to find an Olympic figure skater hiking the trails around Mt. Everest, but then there’s a lot about Alysa Liu that’s unexpected. A year after making her Olympic debut, she walked away from the fame and acclaim that attends every Team USA figure skater, leaving that world behind with a simple Instagram post, and a few months later, she found herself trekking through Nepal toward Everest Base Camp.
“It’s a beautiful experience there,” Liu recalled recently. “No phone. You’re in the mountains.”
For several weeks, Liu and her best friend hiked together across some of the most challenging terrain on the planet, bonding in ways that even best friends rarely do. And her giddiness in retelling the tale is evident.
“We would be, like, [relieving ourselves] behind rocks together,” she laughed. “Like, y’all, we were close. We were connected after that trip. Our friendship survived.”
That kind of bonding — well, maybe minus the bodily-functions-in-the-cold part — was exactly what Liu needed after a lifetime enmeshed in the world of figure skating. On that journey, she learned about herself, her limitations, her ambitions … and also her answers to ridiculous questions.
“We were fighting over the silliest things,” she said, smiling. “Like, would you rather be a cow or a chicken? We were arguing over stuff like that. But trust, it was deep and meaningful.”
And then, a few months later, she just up and decided to come back to skating … and won the world championship and now she’s in the Olympics. Life’s never that easy, but Alysa Liu sure makes it seem that way.
Child prodigy turned Olympic star
Alysa Liu is just 20 years old, which is remarkable. Not because of her demeanor — she admits she’s “still pretty immature” — but because she’s somehow crammed about seven lives’ worth of living into those 20 years. The soon-to-be two-time Olympian is frenetic, exuberant, always in motion, her head and her heart perpetually sprinting against each other.
Spend any time around Liu, and it’s impossible not to be swept up in her constant joy. For instance, check out her free-skate response to a recent question about self-discovery:
“Oh, like, y’all, I've been through so many, like, midlife crises. I'm like 20. I've been through a lot of them. But I'm a thinker. I think a lot. I found I really like human connection. Like, a lot. I'm a very extroverted person. And I also love, like … I make a lot of art, and, like, different types of art, of course. And I love sharing those with people. And like, I love when other people make art too. I don't know. I'm just very much into the arts. What was your question?”
Smoothly gliding from routine to impossible routine, grace and power combined and choreographed … yes, Alysa Liu was made for Olympic figure skating.
Olympic media deploy clichés like “burst onto the scene” for figure skaters the way that Fourth of July celebrations deploy fireworks, but in Liu’s case, the cliché fits. As a precocious 13-year-old, she threw down two triple axels at the 2019 U.S. Figure Skating Championships — no woman had ever cleanly landed more than one at the event — and claimed her first national title.
Her ascent continued — a spot on the 2022 Olympic team, a bronze medal at the 2022 world championships, modeling gigs, an appearance on “The Tonight Show” — but so did the burdens of skating, the endless practice sessions and training sessions and razor’s-edge pressure. After the worlds, she shocked the skating community with the announcement that she was stepping away from the rink.
“I’m going to be moving on with my life,” she wrote on Instagram, and then she went and did just that. Home-schooled as a child, she started studying psychology at UCLA. Stage-managed throughout her career with pre-selected routines and costumes, she spent unstructured time with her family. And she took that now-legendary trip to Everest base camp.
“I really felt trapped and stuck,” Liu said recently. “The only way, in my brain, to reach out (beyond the world of skating) was to leave the sport.”
How skating drew Liu back
It all went very well, this new skating-free life … right up until she took a ski trip to Lake Tahoe in January 2024. The adrenaline rush of speed, the smooth power that comes from gliding over the slopes … she realized just how much she missed the intrinsic, internal gratification of skating. She began by skating once a week at a local rink, and a few months later, announced her return to competitive skating.
Talent like Liu’s finds a way, and in January 2025 she came within a hairsbreadth of winning the U.S. championships again. Two months later, she completed her comeback with a gold-medal-winning performance at the world championships, the first American woman to claim that honor since Kimmie Meisner in 2006. She dethroned Japan’s Kaori Sakamoto, the three-time defending champion, and firmly established herself as a medal favorite heading into the Olympics.
U.S. skating fans are hoping Liu, Amber Glenn and Isabeau Levito — the so-called “Big Three” — can end a two-decade medal drought for American female skaters. If Liu is able to claim any Olympic medal, she’d be the first American woman to do so since Sasha Cohen’s silver in 2006. Sarah Hughes won gold and Michelle Kwan took bronze in 2002.
“If you look back in history and the track record of winning the world championships before an Olympic Games,” says Olympic gold medalist and NBC commentator Tara Lipinski, “it really sets her on the right path to not only be the favorite to win this Olympic gold medal but to bring it home.” (Lipinski knows what she’s talking about; she won the 1997 world championships, and captured gold at the 1998 Nagano Olympics 11 months later.)
Liu also stands as a testament to the calm power of accepting one’s choices and living in the moment. “Quitting was definitely still, to this day, one of my best decisions ever. Coming back was also a really good decision. I don’t make bad decisions. Every decision is just a decision, you know?” she said. “They’ve just led to this point. And I like where I’m at.”
Even so, the zen mindset only carries so far. She admits she’s still impatient, still expecting perfection out of herself at every turn. “I’m competitive in my head with myself, and I love to be good at stuff the first try,” she says. “If things aren’t going my way the day of, I’m like, no, I have to do it today.”
Her coach, Phillip DiGuglielmo, employs a classic Nick Saban mantra — Trust the Process — to keep Liu focused on journeys, not destinations. “He’ll be like, Dude, you’re training, the results will show. You just have to be patient. I’m not patient! I have no concept of time!”, she jokes. “But I listened to his advice. It really works. If you put in the work, trust you’ll see [positive results].”
“She’s so relatable and so authentic in the way that she performs and competes,” Lipinski said recently. “She is skating in her own little bubble without pressure, because she really feels that she’s doing this for herself, and she’s taking full ownership over her skating. And she doesn’t feel the expectations that you would think she would, and that gives her the edge to be able to compete under pressure.”
The Milan Olympics: Liu’s time to shine?
Pressure seems to be about the only sensation Liu isn’t feeling these days. “I wish all of y’all were my little sibling for a day, because I literally have so much fun every day,” she told a group of media in October. “You have no idea. I just can’t live without fun. I think I would just die if things were boring for 10 hours.” There’s no such thing as a typical day for her — she might oversleep her training, she might decide on a whim to go swim in Lake Tahoe, she might go hit a video game cafe and then bust out some karaoke. (Her go-to: KATSEYE’s “Gnarly,” maybe some “old” Selena Gomez or Taylor Swift.)
With the Olympics, though, come a measure of discipline for her schedule. In Milan, she’ll skate a contemplative, resonant short program to the music of Laufey’s “Promise,” and, potentially, a free skate choreographed to “MacArthur Park.”
Her team events begin Feb. 6, the day of the Opening Ceremony, and her single skates will be on Feb. 17 and 19. All that’s left is for Alysa Liu to do what’s she’s been working (almost) her whole life to do.
Oh, and as for that Everest base camp cow-versus-chicken debate?
“I would rather be a cow,” she says. “One, cows get to eat grass. And, like, the cows that I see, they’re just free-roaming the hills. All the chickens that I’ve seen are hidden behind cages. Yeah, no thank you.”
Category: General Sports
