As Alysa Liu recently recounted how she spent her two years of self-imposed exile from figure skating the joy she found in a sense of normalcy and the nonchalance with which she has a tendency to shrug off the extraordinary were evident in her voice and manner.
“Well, I mean, I did a lot, even though I knew I was gonna have all the time in the world, you know, like, done with skating forever,” Liu said. “Now what? But I really, I got to work. I went and got my driver’s license. I started going to, like, doing normal teenage girl stuff, like going to concerts and stuff like that, hanging out with friends and siblings, shopping, you know, like buying non skating clothes and stuff like that. I went to school at UCLA, also normal girl teenage stuff. I summited Mount Everest base camp. I went on many vacations.”
Amber Glenn, the reigning three-time U.S. champion sitting next to Liu, shook her head and interrupted Liu.
“I just want to pause there,” Glenn said. “She, she threw in going shopping and summiting Mount Everest base camp, like it’s the same thing. That, that is an unbelievable feat.”
Liu has always had American figure skating in a sense of disbelief from becoming at 13 the youngest U.S. women’s champion in history, to defending her national title a year later, to stunning the sport by retiring at 16 after finishing sixth at the 2022 Olympic Games, then in a move nearly as shocking, returning to skating in the summer of 2024 and then going on less than a year later to win the World title, the first for a U.S. woman in 19 years.
Liu, now 20, goes into next month’s Milano Cortina Olympic Games as the co-favorite with Glenn to become the first American to win the women’s figure skating competition in nearly a quarter-century, a gold medal quest that no one in the sport saw coming just 15 months ago.
Liu followed up her Worlds victory by winning the Grand Prix Final, skating’s second most prestigious annual competition, earlier this season and then finished second to Glenn at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in St. Louis earlier this month.
Alysa Liu of the United States performs during the women’s short program at the figure skating world championships, Wednesday, March 26, 2025, in Boston. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)The joy with which Liu speaks about her time away from skating is now also evident on the ice. She is at peace with both her decision to walk away and then to return in large part because she has found herself as a young woman and a skater. Liu has come to view skating not so much as a competition but an art form.
“I’m an artist, definitely,” she said.
An artist who has found something she never had until she retired – a voice, in her skating, in her life.
There are times when Liu looks back at the 13-year-old who burst onto the global scene with a talent so rare that she was called figure skating’s Simone Biles, and she doesn’t recognize her. And there are times when she realizes the person she is today was there all along.
She just had to find her.
“I mean, we’re definitely two different people, but I would not change, you know, anything,” Liu said. “I’m glad I had the mindsets that I did back then, and I’m glad everything happened the way it did, because I feel like I wouldn’t have turned out this way. But yeah, I mean, we’re very obviously different people, 13-year-old me and 20-year-old me.
“In that two years, I found, you know, what I like and what I didn’t like. I really got to know myself. Because I got 16, I didn’t really know myself. I couldn’t know myself if I only ever did one thing. So having gotten done like, God knows how many things, I realized I love music, I love to dance, and I love exercising. Like, I love cartwheels. I can cartwheel forever. I love moving. I need to let my energy go into something. And I love being creative, and I love having an outlet. And I mean, I had many outlets already, but I was like, I need more, and skating is one of those outlets.
“I mean, I’m still the same Alysa, like, if you put me back into I guess, like, yeah, 16-year-old me, I would have made the same decisions as me now, even knowing what I know. But I think the moral of the story is that you really got to evaluate yourself, and you need time to do that, and you need space to do that. And if we’re able to give athletes that, they blossom into whatever it is, whether it’s staying on the athlete path or not, they will blossom.”
Liu is the oldest child of Arthur Liu, a Bay Area attorney. The elder Liu was born in China and immigrated to the U.S. as a political refugee because of his participation in the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests in 1989.
Alysa Liu was born in August 2005 in Clovis. The Liu children were conceived via in vitro fertilization and born to surrogate mothers. Arthur Liu told Sports Illustrated that he chose white women as surrogates because he thought his children would “benefit from a diverse gene pool.” Liu was married to Yan Qingxin at the time. Although the couple later divorced, Alysa Liu and her siblings consider Qingxin as their mother.
Arthur Liu spotted his daughter’s skating promise when she was 5 and would spare no expense (or anyone’s feelings) in his bid to create an Olympic champion. The elder Liu estimates he has spent between $500,000 to $1 million on his daughter’s skating career.
“His business,” Alysa Liu said.
And business was good.
Liu, despite competing with a sore throat, won the 2018 U.S. junior title with the second-highest junior score in history (184.16 points), but still only 12, she was age-ineligible to go to the World Junior Championships. That August, she became the youngest female skater in history to land a clean triple Axel in competition.
Liu stunned the sport in winning the ladies title in the 2019 U.S. Championships. At 13, she was the youngest U.S. women’s champion in history breaking a record set by eventual Olympic champion Tara Lipinski, who was 14 when she won 12 years earlier. At 4 feet, 7 inches, she needed help climbing up to the top step of the medal podium.
To put Liu’s triumph into perspective, consider that she was still three years away from being age-eligible to compete at the senior level at the World Championships. It didn’t seem to matter. There would be plenty of opportunities for Liu to shine on a global stage.
“A phenomenal talent,” Lipinski said at the time. “She’s the future of U.S. ladies figure skating.”
She defended her U.S. title in 2020 and then earned the bronze medal at the World Juniors.
But skating, Liu said, was beginning to feel like a “responsibility, a burden.” Arthur Liu fired longtime coach Laura Lipetsky after World Juniors, the first in a series of coaching changes made by him. Arthur Liu in December 2020 added four-time U.S. men’s champion Jeremy Abbott to his daughter’s coaching team that now numbered four people. When Liu’s home rink, the Oakland Ice Center, was closed during the pandemic, she found herself having a recurring thought.
“I was hoping it didn’t open back up,” she said.
Privately, she decided to retire after the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing. While she trained for the Olympics, she was unaware that Arthur Liu had been notified by the FBI in October 2021 and informed that he and Alysa were the targets of what the U.S. Justice Department alleged was a spying operation by the Chinese government. Not wanting to distract her preparations, Arthur Liu did not share the information with Alysa until after the Games.
She successfully petitioned her way onto the team after being forced to withdraw from the 2022 U.S. Championships in Nashville after testing positive for COVID-19. Liu was sixth at the Olympics and then claimed the bronze medal at the World Championships, the first American woman to do so in six years, only the second since 2006.
Two weeks later, Liu stunned the sport, announcing on social media that she was retiring.
“Moving on with my life,” she said in the posting.
“I started skating when I was 5 so that’s about 11 years on the ice and it’s been an insane 11 years.”
Alysa Liu, of the United States, performs during the women’s free skating program at the figure skating world championships, Friday, March 28, 2025, in Boston. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)She said at the time of her unexpected retirement that “It feels not like a sacrifice – but more like I’m graduating.”
“I mean, most of it was a blur, I will say, just because I was so young. ” Liu said recently, looking back on her early success and her decision to walk away from the sport. “And honestly, sometimes skating can feel like the fast life, especially when you’re at that level. You got like interviews, you’re getting flown out for this and that. So it all kind of blended together. Also, my brain wasn’t fully developed, still not right now, but I was traveling so much because of it, and I was starting to get sick of it. I wanted to see my friends, family, like, all I wanted to do was be at home, hang out with my friends, like, and I don’t know, enjoy life. And I felt like all of this training I no longer wanted to do anymore. I was never really passionate, too passionate when I was younger, with, I guess, helping with the programs and really being in the process of it all, and so I kind of just fell out of love with it. And I was like, after Olympics, I really want to quit, and that’s exactly what I did.
“I mean, I feel like no one really knew I was gonna make it,” Liu continued, referring to her retirement. “So they were all kind of shocked. I wouldn’t say they thought it was crazy, but I think people were confused, and I still haven’t really fully explained the reasoning for why I quit, but yeah, people were definitely shocked. And now everyone doesn’t mind that I made the decision now that I’m back, but definitely when I was gone, I’m sure people were like, ‘Why did she do that?’
“Well, I kind of went right into it when I quit. I wasted no time. I was going to concerts, which I never could have done before. I also got my driver’s license so I could drive myself around, drive my siblings, my friends, around. I did a whole year at college, and a little bit of the sophomore year as well. I, yeah, I went on vacation for the first time, and I went many more after that. I went skiing, I went snowboarding. Like I got to do so many different things that I never would have done had I stayed in the sport. And yeah, I got to experience, like, real life during that time. I got to know myself a lot more, know what I like to do, kind of what my passion in life is like, what my calling is. And I love the arts, I love dancing, and I love music and that, and I love sports, and that’s what figure skating is.
“So I kind of realized that, as I, you know, was taking my break, that I loved all those things, and then when I stepped back out on ice, I was like, I can apply all of my interests into this. And I never thought of figure skating in that way before.”
Liu decided to get back on the ice, initially just for fun, after a skiing trip in 2024.
“It was a family trip, and I was skiing, and I really enjoyed it, and I was like, I want to ski all the time,” she said. “I was like, if I could ski every day, I would ski every day, but the mountains are far. It’s like a day trip. You have to really plan it. And the rink is right there. You know, 20 minutes from home. So…”
So she returned to the rink in private and was surprised by how good, how easy it felt.
Alysa Liu, center, reacts with coaches Phillip Phillip DiGuglielmo, left, and Massimo Scali, right, after her performance during the women’s free skate competition at the U.S. figure skating championships Friday, Jan. 24, 2025, in Wichita, Kan. (AP Photo/Travis Heying)Eventually, she reached out for her former coach Phillip DiGuglielmo.
At first, DiGuglielmo’s reaction was somewhere between skeptical and reluctant. Former U.S. champions Rachael Flatt and Gracie Gold had both tried comebacks after stepping away from world class skating only to fail to regain anything approaching their former greatness. Even five-time World champion Michelle Kwan’s 2006 comeback ended in disappointment.
But there was another reason DiGuglielmo was hesitant. By his count, he had been fired by Arthur Liu four or five times, at least three times by text, only to be brought back. After a tall glass of wine, DiGuglielmo called the skater back, determined to talk her out of the comeback.
Liu wanted to come back but only on her terms, she told him. She wanted a voice in everything from music to choreography to costumes. She would decide when she was training too much or not enough.
And one more thing — Arthur Liu would not be involved.
In a recent interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Arthur Liu was asked if he was hurt by his daughter’s decision to exclude him from her return to skating.
“A little bit,” he said. “A little bit. It’s like I brought you up to two U.S. national titles.”
DiGuglielmo and choreographer Massimo Scali decided to rejoin Liu.
She returned to the sport without expectations, certainly she didn’t see herself winning a World title.
“Never,” she said, laughing at the thought.
But after struggling initially with her fitness, Liu’s jumps returned and returned stronger than before. Now seven inches taller than she was when she won her first U.S. title seven years ago, Liu was now not only comfortable in her own skin, she was finally at ease in her body.
“So I guess my framework, my perspective, changed,” she said. “I mean, I think, honestly, the first time I got back out on the ice, I already felt like I was better, also, because I was going through puberty at 16 still, so I wasn’t adjusting my body yet, because I was still, like changing. And so when I came back, you know, I’m not growing anymore. So I just felt stronger. You know, my balance is a lot better, and I felt more comfortable just skating at 19 than I did at 16. Funny enough, even though I took two years off.”
Less than five months after coming out of retirement, Liu won the CS Budapest Trophy in October 2024, her first competition since March 2022. Two months later she won the CS Golden Spin of Zagreb, then finished first in the U.S. Championships short program, equaling her personal best score (76.36) before finishing second overall to Glenn. Later Liu was fourth at the Four Continents Championships in Seoul, less than two points out of the bronze medal.
It was an impressive return, but nothing that hinted at what Liu produced at the World Championships in Boston. Liu won both the short program and free skate in upsetting three-time defending World champion Kaori Sakamoto of Japan and claiming the first World title by an American woman since Kimmie Meissner’s 2006 victory.
“Oh, yeah, I mean, it’s kind of crazy,” Liu said. “I really didn’t expect it, even that day. I would have never thought that I would have won, but either way, like, I’m still on my path.”
And now that path takes her to Milan and a second Olympic Games and a continuing journey of self discovery. Perhaps only days away from a golden moment an American woman hasn’t experienced since 2002, Liu was asked about the low point on her way back to the top of the sport.
“The low point that I learned the most from was, I mean, I can’t even call it a low point, because I feel like everything that you could consider bad, I like, I’m so happy that happened, because I learned so much from it,” she said. “So it was, it’s not a low point, it’s like a learning point. And you got to have those, you know what I’m saying, to grow. And so, yeah, hopefully there are more points like that in the future too. You know, we all want to become like our best selves, and I don’t know, get to experience more. And yeah, you gotta, you gotta make mistakes to learn.
“Yeah, I don’t know. I’m excited for the future.”
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