Alysa Liu had only been back in training for about nine months when she stepped onto the ice at last year’s World Figure Skating Championships in Boston to deliver what might well be the performance of her career. Three years earlier, she had shocked fans when she announced her retirement at age 16. She was content with all she’d accomplished—becoming, at 13, the youngest women’s national champion in history, winning bronze at the 2022 World Championships, placing sixth at the Beijing Olympics. But she was also feeling burnt out, traumatized, and beyond ready to take part in the life she’d missed out on by spending nearly all her days twirling around rinks.
She didn’t touch a skate for two years. Instead, Liu enrolled in college, tried mountain climbing, and hung out with her friends, doing normal teen things. She was happy, thriving, but then one weekend, she went on a ski trip with a friend and found herself yearning to get back on the ice. But this time, she vowed, she would do so firmly on her terms, taking more ownership of her outfits, her music, her routines, her training schedule, her diet—everything.
Coat, Sportmax. Bracelet, Cartier.
Liu returned to training in earnest in the summer of 2024, and now here she was the following March in Boston, 19 years old, draped in a gold sparkly dress, looking more punk rock than ice princess with her smiley nose piercing and zebra-striped dyed hair, as she posed silently in the center of the arena, waiting for her music to begin. While “MacArthur Park” by Donna Summer played, Liu nailed the opening triple flip, several complex jump combos, countless dizzying spins, and intricate footwork en route to winning the world championship. The last time an American had won, Liu was less than 1 year old.
“The happiest I felt was, after I hit my ending pose, seeing everyone stand up and start roaring. I was like, ‘Oh hell yeah!’” she tells me of her triumphant return. “But it wasn’t the winning part that made me feel good, it was actually the skate program I did. It was my favorite run through I’ve ever done. And the energy was insane. Everyone was cheering, clapping, dancing. I would do anything to skate that program and feel the energy of all those people again.”
Watching Liu skate in her 2.0 era, you don’t think about how obvious it is that she was born for this, or how she makes even the most complicated jumps look easy. Okay, you do think about those things; but what shines through more than anything is how happy Liu looks while she’s doing it. She appears serene, even relaxed, while pulling off mind-bogglingly difficult skills on the ice. She skates before packed crowds, but there may as well be no one else in the room—Liu is so clearly doing it for herself this time.
In late October, about seven months after that gold medal finish, Liu is in New York City making the press rounds before she goes into training lockdown ahead of the U.S. National Championships, which will determine whether she would make the Olympic team for the Milan-Cortina Games. (Liu would go on to secure a spot in January, when she placed second at nationals; she will compete this month alongside fellow Team USA members Amber Glenn and Isabeau Levito; thanks in part to some viral TikToks, the Olympic-bound trio has been dubbed the “Blade Angels.”)
Top, skirt, Givenchy. Earrings, necklace, bracelet, ring, Cartier.
When we sit down at our offices following the photoshoot for this story, Liu, now 20, has changed out of the leather and high-heel looks and is dressed as she arrived, in baggy jeans, a graphic tee, and Vans. She tells me with a laugh that her style often gets her mislabeled: “I’ll be at something for athletes, and they’re like, ‘You’re a snowboarder, aren’t you?’ I’m like, ‘Actually, I’m a figure skater, but thank you.’” Although her off-rink wardrobe is “more masculine,” she says she loves that figure skating is “super feminine.”
Liu grew up in Oakland, raised by a single father, Arthur. She is the eldest of five children, all born via egg donors, in vitro fertilization, and surrogates. Her sister, Selena, is two years younger than her, while triplets, Josh, Justin, and Julia, are four years her junior. When they were all growing up, Liu was gone a lot, training in Delaware, Colorado, Florida, Italy—who knows where—but when she did get to visit her family, she loved being “the very fun older sister,” who kept her siblings up too late playing video games.
She started skating at age 5, “because my dad had heard of Michelle Kwan,” she says. By 6, she was competing. She had tons of friends at the gym and, to her, it was all fun and games. “I don’t think I ever realized I stood out,” Liu says. “It was the people around me who did.” She kept competing; her dad hired professional coaches; before long, she was homeschooled to make time for training. “I graduated high school at 15, because everyone wanted me to graduate a year before the Olympics, so for a year I could just focus on training,” she explains.
Dress, shoes, Khaite. Earrings, Tiffany & Co.
“I hate the term, but she was a phenom from the start,” says Phillip DiGuglielmo, who has coached her on and off for more than a decade. “I really think that Alysa is in that little pantheon with Tiger Woods, Serena Williams, and Simone Biles. She is absolutely on par with those phenomenal athletes.”
I ask Liu how it felt, at age 12, when she landed her first triple axel in competition, a skill nearly unheard of for someone her age (she remains the youngest woman to land the skill in international competition), or how it felt the following year when she made history by winning her first national title. “I definitely felt good in those moments,” she says with a shrug. She’s quiet for a beat and then reconsiders. “I’m going to be honest. All my memories from back then are gone. I have no idea how I felt in the moment. I have watched it, and I was crying, and I seemed super happy, so I guess I was very happy.” But she adds, “I didn’t enjoy skating back then because I didn’t make my own programs, I didn’t design my own dresses—I was just following orders.”
“When Alysa came back and she was skating for herself, the performances were magical.”
DiGuglielmo agrees: “Before her self-imposed retirement, she really just did everything people told her to do,” he says. “She never questioned it. I don’t know if you can remember yourself when you were 12 or 13, but you didn’t question authority.”
Seeing footage of herself from those years “feels like watching a different person,” Liu says. “Like, I don’t have those memories.” She chalks it up to “trauma, definitely, 100 percent. I just blocked it out,” she says. She’d arrive at the gym by 8 A.M. and be there for the next 11 or 12 hours. “I skated every single day. I didn’t get a day off, so it was pretty intense,” she says. On top of the grueling schedule, she felt traumatized by the obsession others had with everything she ate and drank. “Ever since I was a kid, I was told stuff like, ‘Don’t eat that,’” she says. “You can’t drink water even, because of water weight. Imagine telling a 13-year-old that they can’t drink water because of water weight!” It all compounded until she reached a breaking point, feeling like “this sport is disgusting and I want nothing to do with it,” she says.
During COVID, when she lived alone and trained in isolation, it got even worse. “I lived everywhere but at home for a bit, and I grew to hate figure skating,” she says. She would Uber alone to and from the rink every day, when “all I wanted was to be with my family and friends at home, and live like a normal teenage girl.” She was tired of never being there for friends’ and siblings’ birthdays. “I felt like I was missing life all for this skating career that I didn’t even care about,” she says. “I didn’t really have a dream of my own, except to be at home.”
Coat, Sportmax. Bracelet, Cartier.
Skirt, Sportmax. Necklace, bracelets, rings, Cartier.
“It was almost like she was holding her breath,” DiGuglielmo says of that time. “She was still giving 100 percent, but there wasn’t any purpose behind it.” After Liu competed at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics and won a bronze medal at the world championships that same year, she hung up her skates. “I knew that little me, at one point, wanted to go to the Olympics,” she says. “And so I was like, ‘Well, I did it. There’s nothing else holding me to this sport. Now, I’m free.’”
“I lived a lot,” Liu says of the gap year that followed her retirement, which she spent doing “everything I possibly could.” She got her drivers’ license; went on her first vacation; danced at concerts with her friends; picked her siblings up at school; went shopping and “finally bought normal clothes”; and climbed 40 miles to the Mount Everest Base Camp. The following year, she enrolled at UCLA to study psychology and moved into a dorm. Through it all, most importantly, she healed. “When I quit, a lot of the toxicity I had attached to skating just, boom, disappeared,” she says.
In January 2024, she went skiing for the first time—something she’d never been allowed to do before, because of the risk of injury. She felt the familiar wind in her hair, the coldness in her cheeks, and soreness in her leg muscles, and realized how much she missed it all. “I think maybe, after she had some life experiences, she looked around and saw that other people didn’t have anything like she had with skating,” DiGuglielmo says. “It’s such an important part of who she is.”
Her first time back on the ice that spring, she landed a double axel. Then, she did a triple Salchow-triple toe loop, and landed that too. “Jumps are so satisfying,” she says, “and that day was the best.” After classes at UCLA ended that June, she was back training full-force. “I knew who I was, I knew what my interests were, what I liked and disliked, and it was really fun,” Liu says of her return to the rink. “When I was a kid, so many people told me who I was and who I wanted to be—there was so much projection. I didn’t have a chance to explore myself, my brain, or my hobbies, but now I have, so I’m feeling really grounded in who I am.”
Everything is different this time around. “She’s not doing it because she is trying to build a legacy or anything like that,” DiGuglielmo says. “She’s just doing it because it makes her so thrilled.” And that comes through when she’s on the ice: “When Alysa came back and she was skating for herself, the performances were magical,” he adds. She hired her own coaches. She drives herself to practice. She chooses her sessions at the rink and decides how much she needs to skate.
Dress, Khaite. Earrings, Tiffany & Co.
“Nobody understands what they’re doing better than Alysa understands what she’s doing,” DiGuglielmo says. “If we’re working on the technique of a jump, it’s, ‘What are you feeling? What am I seeing? Where can we make this look better?’ It’s a collaboration; it would never be me telling her, ‘Do this!’ That would not fly.” And when she wants to, she leaves the rink and goes to hang out with friends. “When you get older, you can control so much of your life,” Liu says. “It’s so much better.”
Skating is a creative outlet for her now. She designs her own dresses: “I’m so into fashion, and I love being able to control little things. Even my training outfits, I get to choose now. Before, I didn’t. Isn’t that crazy? But now I do.” She works closely with her other coach, choreographer Massimo Scali, to select the music she skates to; at the national championships in January, she debuted a new free skate routine set to Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi” and “Bad Romance.”
Looking ahead to the Olympics in Milan-Cortina, Liu insists she “doesn’t really care about competition results. I skate now to show what I can make, and what I can do,” she says. “I really just want to show my art.” She pauses, then adds: “I refuse to not choose my own destiny.”
Lead Image: Necklace, rings, Cartier.
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