The Comeback That Made Alysa Liu America’s Unlikeliest Olympic Champion

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The Comeback That Made Alysa Liu America’s Unlikeliest Olympic Champion

A former child prodigy, she walked away from the sport for two years at the age of 16. She came back her way—and now she is the first U.S. figure skater to win women’s individual gold in a generation

By Louise Radnofsky, WSJ

Feb. 20, 2026 7:00 am ET

Alysa Liu won an Olympic gold medal in figure skating, becoming the first American woman to do so since 2002.

MILAN—A year before she took the ice with the chance to win an Olympic gold medal, Alysa Liu found herself in almost the exact same position a few thousand miles away.

The American figure skater was at her sport’s world championships, chasing a title that had eluded U.S. women for almost her entire lifetime. Not that she was particularly haunted by the history. When she was asked how it would feel to end the drought, Liu said she wasn’t even aware of it.

“I didn’t know that,” she replied calmly. “That’s a fun fact.”

Then she put on a gold dress, skated to Donna Summer and breezed to the top of the podium.

Here’s another fun fact: Alysa Liu repeated the exact same performance with the exact same outcome on Thursday night in Milan.

This time, it was to become the first American woman to win any individual Olympic medal since 2006 and the first to come home with gold since 2002, before she was even born.

The joyful program put Liu in the company of figure-skating royalty. She joined Sarah Hughes, Tara Lipinski, Kristi Yamaguchi, Dorothy Hamill and Peggy Fleming as the only American women with individual Olympic golds in the past half-century.

But she was nothing like any of them. In fact, she was nothing like anyone in her sport.

To reach the most hallowed ground in figure skating, Liu had to retire at 16, unretire two years later, and come back as an entirely different skater with an unapologetically carefree approach. She climbed to the top of the Olympic podium her way.

“It’s doing stuff that people tell you you shouldn’t do,” said Liu, now 20. “I’ve been doing a lot of that.”

Her career in figure skating didn’t start like that. Growing up in the Bay Area, Liu was known first as a child prodigy, then as a cautionary tale about the toll that elite sports can take on young athletes.

Before her comeback, Liu’s greatest successes happened when she was barely into her teens.

She became the youngest ever U.S. champion at 13 in 2019, and was pulling off triple axels and quadruple jumps while she was so tiny that her competitors had to help lift her onto the podium. Her father micromanaged her career, making decisions about who coached her and how they did it. He acknowledges he brought a radar gun to the rink to clock her speed.

Liu was helped onto the podium by Bradie Tennell, left, and Mariah Bell, right, at the the 2019 U.S. Figure Skating Championships.

Liu was helped onto the podium by Bradie Tennell, left, and Mariah Bell, right, at the the 2019 U.S. Figure Skating Championships. Paul Sancya/Associated Press

It all became too much. She went to the 2022 Olympics and finished sixth, took a bronze medal at the world championships a month later—and declared herself done with the sport. She retired at 16 with all the classic symptoms of burnout.

“You can get lost in this sport,” she told reporters last year.

In this sport, a comeback isn’t just unusual but almost unheard of.

Liu returning to figure skating in her late teens would have sounded as preposterous as Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir climbing down from the NBC booth and competing in pairs.

In her two years away from the sport and in the real world, Liu discovered life outside the rink.

Even today, she considers it the best time of her life. She trekked to base camp at Mount Everest. She chased new adrenaline rushes by skiing. She enrolled in college psychology courses. She even got a driver’s license.

What she didn’t do was skate. She also deleted Instagram so she wouldn’t have to see the sport that once dictated her entire life.

When she laced up her skates again, it was purely for her own enjoyment. She had no intention of competing. But it didn’t take long for one hit of dopamine to turn into another—and another.

Soon, she called one of her old coaches to explore a possible comeback. Liu was older, 7 inches taller, with bleached hair and piercings, practically unrecognizable from the wispy child she’d been at U.S. nationals in 2019. As others were overwhelmed by pressure, she was so carefree that she made yoga teachers look stressed.

When she decided to return, she knew that she would only do it on her own terms. This time around, she picked her coaches, Massimo Scali and Phillip DiGuglielmo, whom her father had fired a few months before the Beijing Olympics.

She decided the music she would perform to and what clothing she would perform in. She was no longer the same person, so she couldn’t be the same athlete—and results were the last thing she cared about. Her coaches gave her the freedom she craved and say they don’t train her in a traditional way because she’s not even remotely a traditional skater.

“They are like my two dads,” she says. “I’m just so grateful to have so many fathers.”

Before she returned, there was one last person she had to tell: her actual father.

A single dad with five children through surrogates, Arthur Liu has said he invested $1 million in Alysa’s career. Though Alysa says she still wants to make her father proud, she insists that her comeback wasn’t for him. This week, he watched from the stands as she finished third in the short program on Tuesday and then returned on Thursday, ready to take her shot at gold with a free skate she adores.

Liu can rattle off a list of everything she loves about it: the entrance to the triple salchow, the exit after the loop, the loop itself, the step sequence—and the ebullient finale.

And when the music stopped, even before she knew that she was the Olympic champion, Alysa Liu was beaming.

“I don’t need this,” she said with the gold medal around her neck. “What I needed was the stage. I got that. So I was all good, no matter what happened.”