Alysa Liu 2.0: How retirement, perspective helped

MILAN — Alysa Liu wore a hole smile on the ice. She had achieved a dream, skating at the Beijing Olympics at just 16, but in a principally empty area, few have been there to see the second.

Perhaps that was what Liu secretly wished.

“It’s not that I didn’t want to be seen,” Liu said. “It’s just I had nothing to show.”

The 20-year-old now proudly presents Alysa Liu 2.0.

Four years after surprising the game by retiring as a teenage phenom, the Oakland native might win two gold medals at the Milan-Cortina Olympics. She is a title contender in her particular person event that begins Feb. 17 as the United States tries to end a 20-year Olympic medal drought in ladies’s singles determine skating, and she’s going to skate Friday in the ladies’s short program of a crew competitors the United States is favored to win.

Armed with a new perspective from her two-year retirement, Liu now smiles genuinely on and off the ice, no matter if there’s a medal around her neck or not.

“I have so much I want to express and show, whether that’s through skating or just through my presence,” said Liu, who positioned sixth in Beijing. “It’s exciting to think about that being seen.”

When she made her Olympic debut, Liu didn’t really feel like her profession belonged to her. Her father, Arthur, was a driving power in her skating profession. In a sport where coaches and choreographers often call the pictures for younger athletes, Liu entered the Olympic stage with packages she didn’t like and garments she didn’t choose. She was behind a masks and couldn’t specific herself. She barely knew how to.

Skating had consumed her total life. She felt “trapped and stuck” in the game. So she left.

After retiring following the 2022 world championships — where she received a bronze medal — Liu obtained her driver’s license. She hiked to Mount Everest base camp with associates. She went procuring for not-skating garments, performed Fortnite until 4 a.m. with her siblings and enrolled at UCLA. She liked finding out psychology.

“I found what I like and what I didn’t like,” said Liu, who took time off from UCLA to put together for the Olympics but hopes to return before her associates graduate. “Really got to know myself, because [when] I had skating, I didn’t really know myself. I couldn’t know myself. I only ever did one thing.”

After a informal ski journey reminded her of the fun of skating, Liu made the choice to return to the game that formed, and practically stole, her childhood. But she would only do it on her phrases.

The choreography, the music and the costumes would all be her selection. She doesn’t compete to win. She skates to show her artwork, she said.

In the method, she’s profitable more than ever.

She received the world championship in 2025, changing into the first U.S. lady to win the world title since 2006. She received the Grand Prix last in Japan in December, the last major worldwide competitors before the Milan-Cortina Games to announce herself as a potential Olympic champion.

The day before her last efficiency at the U.S. championships, the ultimate competitors that would determine her Olympic bid, Liu ran to a St. Louis salon to dye her hair to match a new skating costume. Unbothered by the stress of the second, she debuted a Lady Gaga free skate that introduced followers to their toes and earned her a silver medal.

“When you are an Olympic athlete that has a chance in front of the world every four years, it literally is your life’s work that’s on the line,” NBC analyst and two-time Olympian Johnny Weir said. “And she has found a way to compartmentalize that and put it down. … I just think it’s so wonderfully healthy and brave and strong to be doing what she is, because it takes a lot of bravery to put down the pressure that the sport naturally has.”

Liu is just a natural expertise in the game, 2022 Olympian Mariah Bell said. Bell remembered during the Stars on Ice tour in 2022 when the skaters rolled into a new metropolis, drained, groggy and sore from the long bus experience, Liu, dressed in a saggy hoodie and billowing sweatpants, might go on the ice and throw good jumps without warning. Bell stood in awe.

U.S. determine skater Alysa Liu practices on Thursday in Milan.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

After Liu’s short program at the U.S. championships last month set a national championship document, Bell was blown away for different causes.

“She’s so sophisticated and mature and emotional,” Bell said. “When she was younger, she was incredible. But when you’re 13, you don’t skate the way that you do like how she did the short program [at the U.S. championships].”

Skating to Laufey’s “Promise,” a haunting piano ballad, Liu glided through a flawless short program that she said practically moved her to tears. Fans showered her with stuffed animals.

Liu has always commanded consideration in the game. She was the youngest skater to carry out a triple axel in worldwide competitors at 12, turned the youngest U.S. champion at 13 and adopted with another national title at 14. She was the first U.S. lady to full a quad lutz in competitors, doing so in the 2019 Junior Grand Prix in Lake Placid, N.Y.

Six years later, back in that same area for Skate America in 2025, Liu told her coaches she didn’t bear in mind her historic accomplishment.

“It feels like I’m watching or I got someone else’s memories,” said Liu, who had comparable, disconnected, but general optimistic reminiscences of her Olympic expertise in Beijing. “It feels like a totally different person, but we are definitely the same person.”

U.S. determine skater Alysa Liu practices in Milan on Thursday as she prepares for the crew competitors, which begins Friday.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Exchange the fragile, ballerina-like skating clothes with daring, trendy asymmetrical designs. Undo the tight, slicked back bun and deliver in halo dyed hair, darkish eyeliner and the piercing she did herself on the inside of her higher lip. With three horizontal stripes dyed into her hair, each layer represents a yr of the new life Liu is finally pleased to put on show.

“I want to be seen more because I like what I have going on,” Liu said. “I like what I’m doing.”