Milan, Italy
—
After she finished her free skate, the house coming down all around her, Alysa Liu gave her ponytail a flick, stuck the toe of her skate into the ice and turned to take her bow.
Before she did, she dramatically brought both of her arms up and wiped her hands, as if to say, “Well, that’s done. Time to go hit a karaoke bar.”
Ordinarily, the only chill in figure skating emanates from the ice itself. Sports are inherently fraught with tension, but some seem preordained to it more than others.
Figure skating asks a singular athlete to stand alone on an ice rink. Nowhere to hide. No teammates to lean on. Literal bright lights bearing down on them, with the gaze of thousands of eyes as they twirl through spins and power through jumps. The tiniest twitch on either means nothing less than the difference between lifetime immortality and lifetime infamy. Smiles, if they show up at all, usually come in two packages: Forced or exhaled relief.
This very ice has chewed up and spit out its fair share of competitors in the last two weeks. After a devastating free skate that knocked him out of what seemed an assured medal, Ilia Malinin has pledged that his old self is now nothing more than “dust,’’ and he will leave these Olympics a changed person. As if the wide-eyed innocent who arrived here has been hardened. After a similarly disastrous short program, Amber Glenn did not merely cry in the kiss and cry; she sobbed.
Meanwhile, there is Liu. As she came to a stop on her final layback spin, the appropriate gold of her dress shimmering and spinning along with her, the first American woman to win a figure skating gold in 24 years looked happy.
That’s it. Beautifully, ordinarily contentedly happy. No tears. No doubled over at the waist. Just an impish grin and a wave to the crowd.
Then, as the final skater, Ami Nakai sat to wait for her scores – which would determine if Liu were a silver or gold medalist – she just hung out. Grinned at the camera and waved. Hopped out of the leader’s chair to chat with Glenn.
When those scores finally revealed Liu as the gold medalist, the first thing she did was make a beeline one platform over, whereupon she grabbed Nakai out of her kiss-and-cry chair and lofted her up in a bear hug.
And when she was finally introduced to receive her gold medal, dashing through a tunnel and onto the ice, Liu actually mouthed, “What the heck?” On the podium, she seemed more concerned in ensuring that the two mascot stuffed animals were appropriately tucked in with her medal than absorbing the enormity of the moment.
Later, in what can only be qualified as a series of non-sequiturs more than an interview, Liu stopped talking about how much she loved her new dress and how excited she was to wear something totally new in the upcoming gala, and how cool her friends were, and how it was so nice that her dress kinda matched her hair, to answer a very serious question.
How, she was asked, did she handle the Olympic pressure?
To which Liu responded, straight-faced and finally dead serious. “You’re going to have to explain to me what Olympic pressure is. Like, who’s giving it? What’s the pressure?’’
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And therein lies the secret to Alysa Liu.
Once chewed up by the machine of expectation and found guilty of the eternal athletic sin of having too much talent too soon, Liu has since learned how to spit back rather than be spit out.
Her skating is on her terms – her music, her choreography, her practice schedule, her dresses and most of all, her joy.
It is an extraordinary thing to retire at anything at the age of 16. Maybe extraordinary isn’t quite right. It’s absurd.
Who in the world has either achieved so much or been beaten up so badly to need to quit at 16?
Yet that was Liu. She won the US Nationals at 13, such a tiny little thing that they had to help her up to the podium. By 16, she was an Olympian and in her World Championship debut in 2022, she became the first American to medal there since 2016.
Her skating world, the one she first walked into at the age of five, suddenly opened up before her. And that’s when Alysa Liu quit.
She says now that someday she’ll go through all of the gory details of her decision – “I hope people will read my story, even though it’s not full out,” she said with a smile. “But one day it will be.” It’s not hard to fill in the blanks with an age-old story of a prodigy shoehorned into a box only to find the box didn’t quite fit.
Liu is like a bubble you don’t want to pop, floating around from topic to topic with the goofy giddiness that every happy, well-adjusted 20-year-old ought to possess. When she talks to reporters, she says, “You guys,’’ as if they are her buds, and when asked about joining the exclusive sorority of Olympic female champions, acts like any kid would when handed a menu at a far-fancier restaurant than they are prepared to order from.
“I mean, I guess it’s a club? Maybe?” she says. “Wow.”
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But she has had to fight to reclaim that identity, to figure out what she likes – karaoke bars, video games, fashion, art, music, piercings, psychology – so she could become who she is.
Figure skating wasn’t what Liu did; it’s who she was. Born not long after Michelle Kwan won her fifth world title, Liu started skating at five, guided by her father, who knew nothing about the sport but plenty about Kwan. She had a natural affinity for it – a sort of fearlessness combined with power and grace that put her on the trajectory to be the next best thing.
And it’s not that she didn’t want it; she just wasn’t sure if she wanted it because she never really thought about whether she wanted it or not. It just happened. Which is how a person – an outgoing, strong-willed, ebullient person comes to retire at 16.
Full stop. Clean break. Meant to be forever.
Liu went out and did what most of us would consider nothing special. Went to karaoke bars with her pals. Played video games. Enrolled in college. Tinkered with fashion as a means of personal expression. Pierced her labial frenulum – which most people can’t locate, let alone want to pierce – to give herself permanent mouth bling.
When she opted to come back to skating, well, that was the important part. She opted to come back to skating. She wanted it, and there, suddenly, she found the sweet part. This expressive, effusive soul could finally use skating to effusively express her soul.
That she won a gold medal now is no accident. She is a far better skater than the tiny child who won a national title in 2013. It is not because she can jump higher and better but because when she skates, her heart is in it.
Watching Liu skate is to watch someone lost in a beautiful moment that she created. Her free skate here, done to Donna Summer’s “MacArthur Park,” was so dazzling you forgot she was on skates. It was like watching someone float across the ice, the collection of jumps almost like little exclamation points buried into the melody.
The wait to the finish felt interminable. Figure skating is like a pageant wrapped in a game show with a little bit of reality show thrown in. Because she finished third in the short program, Liu skated third from last in the free skate. Both women in front of her – Nakia and Kaori Sakomoto – had a cushion in points and could have easily knocked Liu from the top spot.
As each skated and waited for their scores to post, the crowd tittered with nervous unease. Everyone, that is, except Liu.
“What was I thinking?” she said. “Hmm. What was I thinking? I mean, it’s pretty fast-paced and I love to watch Ami skate and I had a really cool front-row seat.’’
When Nakia’s scores posted – pushing her into bronze position – the arena erupted. But Liu took it all in stride. Eventually, she made the rounds with an American flag draped around her shoulders. She posed for the requisite picture, biting on her medal. She waved to the crowd. She smiled. She took pictures, did interviews, all the things that a gold medalist does.
But later, as she answered questions in the media scrum, she considered the gold medal around her neck that blended so perfectly with the gold in her dress.
“I didn’t need a medal,’’ she said. “If I fell on every jump, I would still be out there wearing this dress, so no matter what, I was all good.’’
