Figure skater Alysa Liu retired from skating but then she came back in 2026 the Olympics, winning the Olympic gold medal, but she never planned for this to happen.
Alysa Liu started skating when she was five years old. In 2019, Alysa Liu was one of the youngest U.S figure skating champions in history at age thirteen. In August 2019, Alysa Liu became one of the first women to land a quad lutz in competition. One month later Alysa Liu won her second consecutive world title in Gdansk, Poland. In April 2022, Alysa Liu announced her retirement from skating
In an interview with Rolling Stone, she opened up about her traumatic past with the sport she most fell in love with. Due to all the pressure she was getting, she quit.
“Yeah. I blocked them out,” said Liu about her memories from that time. “Probably because that time in my life was so bad, I just didn’t want to remember it. Practice was so serious. I would cry after falling on every jump. The team around me was so strict. I was in fight-or-fight mode all the time.I didn’t enjoy being at the rink from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. everyday, but I skated every day because I was scared that I would lose all my jumps and lose my abilities if I took a day off.”
She talked about her past when she wasn’t allowed to eat or drink any water before skating.
“When you’re put into a sport at such a young age and that you start out competitively, you really put all your time and energy into it. So I would skate every single day. Yeah, I never really experienced anything outside of that. When COVID hit, my career actually kind of changed a lot,” said Liu.
Alysa Liu was remembering when she was young and started doing staking. She stated she would skate every single day just to improve, putting her effort into it.
After Liu retired from skating she attended college at UCLA. She enjoyed her life as a teenager, experiencing her life like enjoying fashion, hiking, getting her driver license, getting piercings, dyeing her hair, and going on trips. Before she returned to skating, she again realizing she loved the sport so much that she missed it.
Many fans of hers were there cheering for her out there in the women’s single figure skating competition at the Olympics. She won first place, later getting a lot of interviews.
