‘If there was no one on Earth, I would still skate’: Alysa Liu on her remarkable figure skating comeback

Alysa Liu looks back on the ice as rotates on her left foot, picking up speed before she completes her triple flip-triple toe combination. A group of high schoolers on a field trip sitting in the stands erupts into applause. She gives a smile and small bow as she skates away. It’s a recovery day for her, starting with dynamic stretching and cardio before moving onto the ice with her jumps, spins, and footwork. She drives herself to the rink for a two-hour skating session. Later this afternoon, she plans to attend her brother’s basketball game.

If you had asked Liu a year and a half ago if she would be preparing for another figure skating world championships, she would have told you that you were crazy.

Known as the youngest ever US figure skating champion – and the youngest American woman to land a triple axel and only American woman to quad lutz – Liu was widely hailed as America’s rising star that would challenge Russian dominance in figure skating. But at the age of 16, she decided to walk away. Two years later, she has reemerged with a fresh purpose in her sport, rising to new heights ahead of this year’s world figure skating championships, which get under way on Wednesday afternoon at Boston’s TD Garden.

Why she left

The opportunity to reflect about her purpose on the ice presented itself during the Covid-19 quarantines. When California’s ice rinks shut down, her usual training schedule halted.

“That was my first ever break,” said Liu, who had skated mornings and afternoons seven days a week for years. “Once quarantine started, I was like, ‘Wow! This is what not skating is like.’ And I loved it so much.”

To continue training amid a growth spurt and the pandemic, the then-15-year-old Liu moved to Delaware with her father. With limited in-person coaching lessons, she said she would lay on the ice and blast music, relishing the freedom to create structure for herself. The isolation gave her mind a sense of peace and curiosity.

“That’s when I was thinking: what do I want out of this sport?,” Liu recalled. “I never really had time to stop and think for a moment. It was just me in the rink like that for a long time. I was really totally connected with myself.”

Among the realizations: she missed her family.

Liu grew up as the eldest of five children, with a sister and triplets a couple years younger, but she was the only one who skated. Her schedule took her away to the ice, back and forth from dorms to training centers and competitions around the world so much that everything in her memory remains a blur. She calculated that after the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, she would move away for college.

“My worry was that I’ll have never lived with my family. I’m growing up so fast, so young. I knew that if I continued skating, I would never have a chance at home,” she said. This disconnect showed up in other ways: a purposefully missed flight to the Colorado Olympic training center, a panicked FaceTime to her old coach Phillip DiGuglielmo. She pushed through, hoping that the Olympics would be worth the sacrifice.

In Beijing, Liu skated two clean programs and placed seventh on the day in the women’s competition, the highest among the Americans. Because of Covid-19 restrictions, foreign spectators were not allowed to watch. Although athletes were mostly restricted to the village, Liu embraced the experience and also found the little moments to enjoy, like practicing her Mandarin and taking advantage of the dim sum bar for breakfasts.

After finishing her competition season by winning a bronze medal at the 2022 world championships, at 16, Liu shocked the world when she posted a retirement announcement on Instagram, a decision she said she secretly reached months before and posted before anyone could stop her. She then temporarily disabled her social media.

For almost two years, Liu explored who she was outside of skating. She took her first family vacation to Mexico and went on a Himalayan trek with friends and no internet in Nepal. She tried other sports like tennis, volleyball and basketball while hanging out and watching movies with her siblings. (She keeps a running list in her notes app of her favorite films, including Everything Everywhere all at Once, Children of the Sea, Spirited Away, and Bottoms.) But she still continued to stretch to maintain her mobility and flexibility. (One of her life goals is being able to do a cartwheel even when she is really old.) She did a smiley piercing on herself. She started school at UCLA in the fall of 2023.

A ski trip with friends at Lake Tahoe inspired her to reevaluate her relationship to skating. Gliding down the hill at full speed, Liu realized that she wanted to get back on the ice again. With abundant knowledge and access to rinks and coaches, Liu felt that she would be a “hypocrite” if she said she loved skiing but did not love skating.

“I love sports. I like moving. I also love music and I love dancing. That’s literally skating?” she laughed.

While balancing her winter quarter classes at UCLA, Liu decided to add in a public ice session once a week at the Toyota Sports Performance Center in nearby El Segundo. She quickly discovered that she could still do the complex jumps she once did when she was younger. After months of wanting to distance herself from skating as her identity, she found herself drawn back time and time again to the ice as a hobby and source of expression.

“If there’s days where you just want to be on the ice for fun when it’s not planned in your training schedules, I feel like that’s kind of when you know you still like it,” she said. And she still loved it. “I don’t really regret anything I’ve ever done, so even things I really hated doing, I wouldn’t change.”

Guiding her own comeback

When she was younger, Liu said her father mostly oversaw the decisions of firing and hiring of coaches, including right before the 2022 Olympics. This time, she knew that she wanted to build her own team.

In February 2024, she requested a call with her old coach, Phillip DiGuglielmo, who had seen her skate since she was five years old in Oakland. She also sought after Massimo Scali, a former Italian ice dancer and choreographer whom she remembered that she liked to work with.

“They both understand my psyche, the psychology that I had then and now,” Liu said. “Compared to a lot of other skaters, I can be seen as really weird or crazy because I literally quit and came back. They would be uneasy with me.” Her goals were not related to a specific podium placements. “It’s just really great to have a team that understands you because a lot of people in skating misunderstand me.”

When DiGuglielmo hopped on a FaceTime call with Liu, he spent two hours poking holes about her comeback logic. Why now? She had essentially done it all already. Was she ready for more hours of training? What about all the other reasons she had quit?

The hip problems that Liu had from repeatedly practicing triple and quad jumps had slowly gone away as her body had time to heal. She would focus on developing stronger muscles and stamina, no longer “cheating” with shortcuts during workouts. She knew she could also prioritize hanging out and sightseeing at competitions with friends and family. The food and body image issues she had developed, including comments from one coaching team that her at-home Chinese food diet had “so much fat” and “was bad for her]”, went away as she got older and formed her own impressions and opinions.

“It wouldn’t happen this time, because I kind of know why [these problems] were there before and that none of those things really can affect me,” she said. She finds all aspects of skating much more enjoyable now. “I’m skating for a different reason now. I’m really skating just to state now”

“It’s the team that she decided, it’s the people that she trusts. And all of this gave her such a level of empowerment and such a level of freedom of really of using us as people that are guiding who she is, but not deciding who she is and how she has to do things,” Scali said.

Creating her program message

Liu took charge of selecting her music and program aesthetic. She saved songs in her Spotify playlists and made vision boards. She went in-person to designer Lisa McKinnon’s studio in Los Angeles to check on costume designs. She trained at Lakewood Ice rink, with remote training and frequent trips by her coaches before putting a pause on her classes last fall.

Her short program came together quickly, skated to fellow half-Chinese Icelandic pop jazz artist Laufey’s Promise, communicating a message of sudden goodbyes, a failed promise to stay away, and an inevitable reunion. Her free skate program radiates disco high energy and joy using Donna Summer’s MacArthur Park. Soon, Liu was landing on the podium at different international competitions, placing first at two Challenger Series assignments in Hungary and Croatia.

At her first return to the US figure skating national championships in January in Wichita, Liu placed a narrow second behind Amber Glenn. Her Laufey short program led to a standing ovation and tears from her coaches.

“The difference is night and day, really. The level of engagement and authenticity that she has now, the connection. She came back better. This journey is so beautiful for her. We are fighting to keep her authentic to who she is,” said Scali.

Within women’s skating, there is this pervasive idea that you need to be younger to execute the rotations and physicality required. As people undergo puberty and their center of gravity changes, skaters have to adjust, sometimes losing consistency in skills that used to come more easily. It’s rare to have skaters walk away and return at the elite level.

“The sheer fact that she took two years off and came back a better all-around skater, with stronger power, with better skating skills, with a greater attention to detail in her musical expression, like all of that? I don’t even know how that’s possible,” said figure skating analyst Jackie Wong. “People work years to try to improve all of these sorts of intangibles that she’s improved on.”

The figure skating community has been supportive of Liu’s return. At international competitions, DiGuglielmo says that skaters young and old line up to meet her. “As you start to grow up, and your body changes, and things are harder, and school gets harder, you can’t fulfill all of your dreams. They look at Alysa and say: ‘Hey, I’m gonna go back and I’m gonna finish my dreams here,” DiGuglielmo said.

For all of the hype that she received when she was younger for her list of “firsts” and being a skating prodigy, Liu hopes that more people focus on longevity and break down the stereotype of having to accomplish a lot when they are younger. “I think it holds people back from once they do hit adulthood, people don’t want to try skating because there’s already this narrative that they’re gonna fail already,” she said.

Making memories at worlds and beyond

The fact that Liu’s comeback has been so fast shows how innately talented she is to begin with, said Wong.

“Maybe [before] she wasn’t even pushing herself to 75 or 80%,” analyst Wong said.

The American women have a significant task as worlds return to Boston this week. The top two finishers have to have a combined placement of 13 or less to earn the United States three spots at next year’s Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina. Each point and level of execution will count.

At the Four Continents Championships last month in South Korea, one of Liu’s spin elements was judged at a lower execution level than expected. It was her fellow teammate and competitor Glenn who took up the torch of encouragement, joking that the women would host a spin boot camp.

“Alysa is such a consistent competitor and for something as simple as a spin level to be the difference in placement would be a disservice to her,” Glenn said. She notes that having Liu back has been “incredible” and Liu “lightens the mood” when things get stressful or tense at competitions. The two last saw each other in-person when they both performed at the Legacy on Ice” tribute show in DC, commemorating the 67 victims, many from the figure skating community, who died during a midair plane crash at Ronald Reagan International Airport. Liu had skated to the song “Hero” by Mariah Carey to honor the first responders.

Liu trains about four days a week now with a focus on building stamina to improve her performances on the ice. Every now and then, “just to relax [her] mind and try new things and not be too boring in practice”, she’ll try the famous triple axel – a jump that requires skaters to complete three and a half rotations in the air with a forward takeoff – that holds one of the highest point values in competition. She is also open to someday trying to land the quad lutz again, a jump she has not done in competition since pre-puberty.

Although she’s successfully landing the triple axel during practices, her coaches and her agree that they won’t be adding the jump into the lineup until her stamina improves because of the injury risk.

“You put a triple axel in the program, and it changes the dynamic of the rest of the program. All of a sudden so much energy goes into that jump,” DiGuglielmo said. “But I wouldn’t put limits on Alysa. I just wouldn’t, I wouldn’t. I think that would be a big mistake.”

It would be great if she won the short program, he said, but one of the goals he tells Liu for this worlds is for her to be more conscious of making memories. She said she wants to go up in the stands and watch and appreciate more performances in Boston. She takes her skating very seriously, but she doesn’t take competitions seriously. For her, competitions are an excuse to skate more and showcase her passion for music and dance, rather than focus on making the podium or even the Olympic team next year.

Liu carries around her Sony Cyber-shot and a disposable camera, snapping photos of friends and moments she wants to capture and keep. She journals to remember her days more. After this season ends, she plans to start school again next quarter and will go on tour with Stars on Ice and perform in a show in Colorado and Delaware before returning to training. But even without the journaling, she says she can remember this comeback journey more because she is approaching it with more intent.

“It’s a satisfying feeling. If there was no one on Earth, I would still skate. As long as there’s music and as long as there’s ice and our skates, I would still do it,” Liu said.