Alysa Liu and Four Minutes That Changed the Olympics Forever

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Alysa Liu and Four Minutes That Changed the Olympics Forever

Elite athletes have become candid about the scrutiny and stress they face. The Games will never be the same.

By Jason Gay, WSJ

Feb. 23, 2026 10:00 am ET

Forever it will live as instant happiness, a bad-mood buster: Alysa Liu’s climactic, wildly charismatic free skate at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics.

I put it on a few hours ago, because I still haven’t watched it enough—Liu charging around the ice to Donna Summer’s “MacArthur Park,” a disco queen reimagined as a wintry blade-spinning superstar—and let me tell you, those four minutes or so really work. It felt like stepping into a blast of sunshine.

Liu’s skate, which won her the individual gold medal, the first U.S. women’s skater do so since 2002, is already Winter Olympics legend. It’s being hailed not only for its technical brilliance but for its liberation—the way that Liu, a child prodigy who quit the sport in her midteens, vaporizes the sport’s gloomy tension and judgment into something so unabashedly joyous.

Shorter version: Liu had fun. In a stressful, often cruel environment, it felt less like a performance, and more like a merry rebuke.

Was Liu’s skate the zenith moment from these Milan Cortina Games? I’m not making that call, buddy. I don’t know how you can settle on a single highlight from an Olympic fortnight which included a Norwegian cross-country skier, Johannes Klaebo, collecting six gold medals, a record for a single Winter Games. How do you possibly pick from a Games which featured not one but two overtime 2-1 golden goals in men’s and women’s hockey, both won by Team USA over Canada?

I’ll say this. Liu’s gold medal was perhaps the most emphatic response to a topic which hovers over every Games: pressure.

Pressure’s been around the Olympics since Coroebus of Elis scampered in his bare feet, and we’re more sensitive to it now, especially its corrosive effects. It’s why we’ve become humane at handling events like Ilia Malinin’s rough night in men’s skating, in which a metric ton of exterior and self-imposed pressure seemed to contribute to his public unraveling.

Yes: Calling himself the “Quad God” may have been a tactical error. But Malinin, who helped win a team gold for the U.S., acknowledged his mistakes and impressively stuck around for the remainder of the Games. By the end, he was holding his head high at Liu’s gold medal romp, and uncorking his back flip in the Games-ending gala.

Malinin will be back, better equipped. Nothing’s more stirring than seeing an Olympian override pressure. It can be beaten.

That certainly seemed like the case in week two when Mikaela Shiffrin captured slalom gold in Cortina d’Ampezzo.

No athlete entering these Games faced more pressure than Shiffrin, the former phenom who won gold at Sochi 2014 and dominated World Cup racing but for whom the Olympics became a psychological riddle. She struggled with it, she confronted it, and finally, on a clear day in the Alps, she conquered it again, weeping at the finish line.

That’s when you really see what Olympic pressure is: not in the reaction to failure, but to success.

You see it in someone like Elana Meyers Taylor, a 41-year-old multiple silver and bronze winning mother from Texas who finally took a sledding gold in her fifth Games. You see it in surprises like Ben Ogden’s silver medal romp in cross-country, the best U.S. men’s performance in 50 years.

Every struggle, every wait, is worth it.

Consider Connor Hellebuyck, the impenetrable goalie and star of Sunday’s Team USA victory over Canada. A lightly recruited prospect who didn’t play elite junior hockey and took the long road to the NHL, he is a stirring case for the late bloomer, a candidate overlooked in youth sports, amok in their emphasis on winning and shaking parents down for money.

At 32, after multiple game-saving stops, Hellebuyck is now a legend in the U.S. and vanquished Canada. The longer road can be richer.

I could go on. The Games do. The Olympics are a colossal and often colossally shaky endeavor, historically intertwined with waste and overspending, but if you’re looking for a sell, here it is: Every day, you can see the best day of someone’s life.

That’s the promise, and almost always, the Games deliver.

Which leads us back to Alysa Liu, and how much she shined in her golden moment. Few young athletes have been as candid about the maw of elite sport, and even fewer have shown the courage to completely skate away, as Liu did, retiring at 16, a champion worn down by the relentless pressure, and eager to become human again.

She’d find her way back, on her terms, setting rules about protecting her health and individuality, and accepting what came her way. It bears reminding: Liu didn’t enter that free skate as the favorite. As her routine gained momentum, however, it became clear something more was happening. Liu wasn’t chasing a gold medal. She was free.

“Peak happiness,” Liu later called it, and that was very hard to argue at these Olympics. Watch for yourself. It sure worked for me.