If Alysa Liu wasn’t a figure skater, she might be a stunt performer. Or a skier. Maybe a snowboarder? Surfing is on her list of things to try. Over the course of a single day this past summer, these extreme physical pursuits all receive due consideration, because Liu is a speed freak. She loves to go fast — to fly. She even loves falling.

“That’s how I know I’d be good at stunts,” she tells me animatedly as she pilots her car around her Oakland, California, hometown. “Because I know how to fall.”

Knowing how to fall, of course, is inherent to the life of an elite athlete; but the real art is in how you get back up. As a teenage ice skating phenom, Liu realized she was miserable and quit at just 16. Over the next two years, she took the time to figure out who she really was — an exceptionally rare decision for a young competitor, especially in skating, where retirement usually comes well before 30.

When Liu returned in 2024, she brought a fresh perspective, along with striped hair, a punk-rock attitude, and a refusal to be a training automaton. You know what happened next: In a gold-sequined dress trimmed with insouciant disco fringe, she performed a free-skate routine to Donna Summer’s “MacArthur Park Suite” at the Olympics in Milan this past February.

Her jumps were high and her turns tight. But what the millions of people watching also saw was a fearlessness that transcended technical skill. In a sport known to be psychologically as well as physically punishing, Liu skated euphorically — relaxed and beaming, inhabiting her body totally. This was her comeback.

She won double gold and entry to a new realm of celebrity. Suddenly, she was chatting with Zendaya at Paris Fashion Week; walking the carpet at the Vanity Fair Oscar party; popping up in a Laufey music video alongside Hudson Williams, Lola Tung, and Megan Skiendiel; and twirling in a ruffled burgundy Louis Vuitton gown at the Met Gala. Still, she managed to wrap up a tour with her Olympic teammates for Stars on Ice, a seven-week road show through more than two dozen cities with up to four performances a day.

What we all suspected watching Liu from afar is quickly confirmed in person: She’s a natural at being a natural. At 21, she can telegraph pure enthusiasm for just about everything she encounters — a breakfast sandwich handed to her at just the right moment, a kick-ass Yoko Ono T-shirt, or the singer/songwriter Faye Webster, whose music, she says, feels like “a summer day in a field.”

On first impression, what strikes me most isn’t her iconic striped-halo hair. Nor is it her frenulum piercing — a pair of curved devil tails resting delicately on her two front teeth when she grins. It’s her unwavering eye contact and the openness in her expression to what I might say next. Her face is a dimmer switch waiting to light all the way up.

On a late June morning at the Yerba Buena Ice Skating & Bowling Center in San Francisco, Liu is back training with her coaches, Phillip DiGuglielmo and Massimo Scali. In the post-Games frenzy, she’d gone from seeing them every day to not at all. As we watch Liu do her warm-ups, Scali, her choreographer and artistic coach, remarks bemusedly, “She kind of got kidnapped by the world.”

In truth, she’d never be totally theirs again. With all the shiny new demands on her time, it was still an open question whether she would compete this coming year. Liu had already skipped the ISU Figure Skating World Championships and was firm that she wouldn’t enter the new season in the fall unless there were programs she felt ready to perform at the highest level.

Her schedule, she explains to me, isn’t based on competition: “If my programs don’t come about, I can’t do the season. I orbit around what I make, not competitions.”

Still, when she announced her decision to hold off and “recalibrate” in an Instagram post on August 25 — concluding with a breezy “See yall soon!!” — there was a collective gasp. Perhaps it was out of fear that she wouldn’t actually come back — that she’d achieved her goal and was moving on, that we’d lost a new heroine already.

“I’m not dropping out of figure skating,” she assures me two weeks after the reveal. “This time, I have a plan.” (More on that later.)

Seeing Liu happily zooming around the ice, it’s clear this is where she’s most at home. As the opening notes of Deee-Lite’s 1990 smash “Groove Is in the Heart” play from her phone, reverberating through the rink’s tinny speakers, the handful of people present for this semi-private session all stop to watch.

“We’re going to dance, we’re going to dance,” the song begins. “We’re going to dance and have some fun.”

It’s the early days with this short program. Liu is breaking in new skates — an unavoidably painful process — so her jumps and spins aren’t quite at full throttle. But it’s clear she is taking pleasure in movement, flashing a smile with a little hop-skip to pick up speed. To my right, Liu’s manager, Gabriela Pelletier, a former competitive skater herself, nods along with the music. The phrase “collective effervescence” springs to mind. DiGuglielmo, who is standing on the ice, leans back against the barrier and puts his elbow next to mine.

“As a performer, she’s like Yo-Yo Ma,” he says. “When you watch her skate, you’re with her. She pulls you in to be on the ice. That’s rare.”

So, what does the Yo-Yo Ma of skating want to do next? I spent the next few months getting to know Liu during this strange, pivotal time in her career. What comes after your dreams have come true? What does winning mean to someone for whom winning almost seems beside the point?

To understand what comes next, you have to understand what came first. Liu’s skating life started conventionally enough. As a 5-year-old, her love of flying and falling caught the eye of her father, Arthur Liu, when he first took her and her younger sister Selina to the Oakland Ice Center for a public session. She met her best friend, Juju, when they were 6, and the two became inseparable. DiGuglielmo coached them both.

If he scrolls back far enough on his phone calendar, DiGuglielmo can find the date of his first lesson with Liu: March 24, 2012. “Her regular coach was going on maternity leave, and she asked me to coach this little girl while she was gone,” he recalls with affection. Liu was always a hard worker, but she also loved to skate for fun. After six hours of practice, DiGuglielmo says, “she’d get back on the ice and play for another hour with her friends. That social time was important.”

Arthur, a lawyer, was an early presence at the rink. He immigrated to California from China as a political refugee after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, in which he was a prominent student organizer. Alysa is the oldest of five siblings, all of which her father had via surrogates, including Selina, 18, and a set of 17-year-old triplets. When they were very small, all five children slept in the same room, stacked up in three bunk beds.

As Liu became a better skater, that familial closeness — and her cherished friendships — became harder to maintain. From sixth grade through high school, she was homeschooled online and began spending whole days at the rink: 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

In retrospect, she recognizes that this was, as she puts it, “crazy.” But she was a kid; she did what she was told. “When I was younger, I wanted to win all the time,” she says. “But winning was really about getting reassurance from my coach and my dad, and just making them happy, making them think I was, like, perfect or something. And so that’s why I wanted the medal. It wasn’t really about the medal. It was about perception and how people perceive me — specifically the people closest to me.”

In 2019, at the tender age of 13, Liu became the youngest U.S. figure skating champion in history and the first American woman to complete three triple axels in a single competition. Despite the external triumphs, she doesn’t remember much about that time: “Every day was the same.”

The way Liu tells it reminds me of the story of Sleeping Beauty. COVID was when she woke up.

She was 14. The rinks had closed, and, for the first time, Liu had a day off. Suddenly, she realized how exhausted she was — and that she had never made a single decision of her own in her entire life: her music, her routines, her costumes, her hair, her makeup, what she ate.

“The combination of environment, puberty, and isolation — it affected me pretty badly for the two more years I continued to skate,” Liu says. We’re talking in the locker room at the Oakland Ice Center, where she spent countless hours of her young life. “I would cry all the time — like, every session — and not in a good way.”

During one of her lonely pandemic days in Colorado Springs, where she’d moved alone to train, she dared to ask herself a question: What would it be like to not skate? The idea felt strangely hopeful. She decided she’d go to Beijing for the 2022 Olympics to fulfill a promise to her younger self. Then, she would quit. She told no one about her plans — not her coaches, not her dad, not her friends. It would be her decision, and hers alone.

In April 2022, when Liu announced her retirement on Instagram, there was blowback from other people in the sport; but she didn’t care.

DiGuglielmo was steadfastly in her corner. “I got a million phone calls from U.S. Figure Skating,” he recalls. “People were saying, ‘You owe it to your country, your fanbase, your coaches’ — that kind of thing. How am I supposed to tell her she should keep skating even though she doesn’t love it anymore? Girl has her own agenda.”

Liu calls everything up until that point her “first life.” Alysa 2.0 was going out of office.

Women’s figure skating is the marquee event of every Winter Olympics. In the world of elite competitive sports, it isn’t alone in having a history of prioritizing winning over well-being, but it has a special reputation for cruelty. As with gymnastics, the physics of ice skating favors youth and a high strength-to-weight ratio; girls are especially vulnerable to body-shaming and social pressures. Eating disorders are a known problem. The tendency toward perfectionism and emotional stoicism — and toward keeping injuries hidden — is long-established.

In this quietly conformist culture, the fact that someone would abandon a meteoric rise sent a shock wave through the sport. But to Liu, that was exactly the point. She was 16, and she had come to hate skating.

She took a gap year. Because she’d already completed her requirements to graduate from high school at 15, “I had a lot of empty days where I could think,” she says. She got her driver’s license and took her siblings out. She went on vacation for the first time — a family beach trip to Mexico in which she swam and looked at the fish. She trekked to Everest Base Camp. She hung out with her friends (“a lot”) and built the community she had been missing for so long.

Liu also enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she studied psychology. “Because of everything that happened, I wanted to understand what I was going through,” she says. “It helped me process a lot in my emotions.” She has always journaled to help her think through the day-to-day; every once in a while, she looks at what she’s written, just to check in with herself.

In the winter of her freshman year, she went skiing in Tahoe. The fun, the adrenaline rush, and the sensation of pushing her body to the limit gave her the same feeling as skating, and she missed it. She wondered what it would be like to get back on the ice.

It was Juju, her oldest and best friend, who accompanied her back to the Yerba Buena ice rink in January 2024. “I would never have gone otherwise,” Liu says. “I owe my comeback to my friends, in a way.”

Soon after, Liu called DiGuglielmo and Scali and told them she wanted to skate again. She started working regularly with sports psychologist Caroline Silby, who helped the two coaches understand how important relationships were to Liu. During her comeback season later that year, when the team began traveling internationally for competitions, they made sure to build in regular FaceTime calls with her friends and family.

It gave her time to stay Alysa, instead of being consumed by Alysa the Athlete.

“She was 18, and she was different,” DiGuglielmo says. “She brought energy, her own ideas. She wanted to think outside the box. For Massimo and me, it has been so much more exciting to collaborate with her on everything.”

I ask Liu about her relationship with her father. “Now, he’s just my dad, which is great,” she says matter-of-factly. “Like, he’s not my coach, or my momager.”

She is adamant that she wouldn’t change anything. “If I went back in time, I would still want myself to go through everything, just so I could come to my own conclusion,” she says. There’s an internal steadiness built on that conviction. “Now, I don’t look to other people to find my happiness anymore. That has changed the definition of winning for me.”

There’s value in being familiar with darkness, she adds: “I also saw the beauty in it. In the struggle. It makes you feel alive.” Her skating going forward reflects that maturity.

The truth is that Liu is bursting with things she wants to say and put out in the world. Making programs is her jam; she has a million ideas. But it all comes down to her emotions and her gut: “So much of it really is, like, ‘Does this move feel good?’ And sometimes it doesn’t, so I move until it does.”

“With her choreography, it’s so special,” Scali tells me. “We sew the program onto her abilities and feelings. We start with an era and the movements” — right now, it’s Deee-Lite for the short program and a 1970 Argentine tango piece for the free skate — “and she picks the specifics, what looks good on her.” Then, they work with DiGuglielmo to build in all the elements: jumps, spins, etc. It’s a constant back-and-forth.

Both Scali and DiGuglielmo point out that this ongoing process of collaboration with a skater throughout a season is unusual. It presents extra challenges, but it is also “what makes Alysa a true artist,” says Scali.

Wardrobe, of course, is a crucial piece of the puzzle; it’s an understatement to say Liu adores fashion. “I love wearing weird shit on the ice,” she tells me. Sometimes, she sketches ideas in her notebook. She isn’t seeing specifics yet for her new short program, but she has a sense of what colors fit: oranges, pinks, blues.

I ask if she’s looked at her journal recently, and she nods, considering. Then she laughs to herself, as if hearing a private joke.

“Yeah,” she says, her bright eyes meeting mine. “I had a good year.”

With her fame growing exponentially by the minute, can Liu stay as real as she is? Her friends are trying to convince me that, yes, she hasn’t changed. “Alysa is as bubbly in real life as she is in the media,” says Yaery, who met her in preschool. Hearing this, Liu covers her face.

“She’s a really good friend,” Sara, who knows Liu through skating, adds earnestly. “She always makes time for us.”

We are sitting at A16, a neighborhood pizzeria in Oakland’s Rockridge neighborhood. From the first hug, lunch is less of a conversation than a group stream of consciousness. Elle, who was Liu’s roommate at UCLA, goes slightly off-script, noting that Liu keeps odd sleeping hours. “There are days when she doesn’t sleep at all. One time, she didn’t sleep for, like, four days. She turned gray.”

Liu chimes in. “After the Olympics, I was awake for three days!” she exclaims. “Because of all the media. I didn’t sleep until the flight home. I was turning gray there, too.”

As Liu and her friends walk down the street after the meal, they sing songs and link arms, reminding me of the silliness, purity, and beauty of friendship at their age. Just as they’re clowning beside a flowering hedge, two women in sundresses across the street slow down and point. I glance at my watch: less than two minutes. Soon, an older man in a Porsche pulls over and waits patiently with paper and pen for an autograph opportunity. A group of teenage girls approach and start to take their phones out. After Pelletier, Liu’s manager, politely rebuffs them, they get sulky. A few minutes later, they speed by in a car and yell something unintelligible out the window.

When you have 8 million followers on Instagram, many will have parasocial feelings about you. Inevitably, you will disappoint at least a few of them with an offhand comment — or just by breathing.

“A weird thing is that people are so quick to love me or hate me,” Liu tells me later. “I feel like people have preconceptions about me, and I’m just like, damn. I wish no one felt that, you know?”

This is a totally normal human reaction, and it’s something she is still getting used to. But, also — maybe? — she doesn’t actually want to get used to it. Any way you cut it, life is different now that she’s famous. Liu is a fashion icon — a Louis Vuitton ambassador, a Nike athlete.

“I don’t really like hiding stuff about myself,” she says. “But now, I low-key have to, to protect my peace.” It isn’t easy navigating life as the quintessential sports star for the new era: She’s both everyone (relatable!) and one of one. She represents what Americans are striving for — success, yes, but also what makes a full life: balance, independence, and joy.

In late August, Liu returned to the headlines with a post announcing that she’ll be taking the year away from competition.

She was fresh from a vacation in Japan with the triplets; it was the first time they’d done something like that, and she was delighted by how truly bonding the experience felt. She made a book of Polaroids documenting moments on the trip: eating ramen, swimming in Kamakura, taking the train to Tokyo.

“So, I procrastinate, basically,” Liu tells me with a laugh a couple of weeks later, when I ask her to walk me through her thinking. “It seems spontaneous, but it’s not. I don’t like making decisions until the last minute, and it was complicated.”

Even throughout the process of choreographing both of her programs, which I’d witnessed back in June, she wasn’t sure what she’d do. “I was telling Massimo and Phillip this, so they knew about my idea and wouldn’t be jump-scared if it happened,” she says. “But it was a gradual process.”

In some ways, she explains, this is an investment in her longevity in the sport. “If I want to do four more years, this is the perfect time to take a year off,” she says. “Then, it’s three years to the next Olympics. That feels better for me — more sustainable. Why should I wait to work on the things I want to work on next?”

A willingness to change it up. “That was my thought process.”

Was there any kind of emotional overlap with her decision to quit before?

“Like, not at all,” she says. “I’m in a different headspace completely. I talked with my coaches, with Gabriela, with everyone really close to me about it. I got feedback from U.S. Figure Skating officials, and I really weighed all my options — because if it [wasn’t] logical to take the season off, I wouldn’t do it. I want to stay in the sport. Versus before when I quit, I was like, ‘I’m not going to tell anyone because I will not be swayed.’”

It begs the question: What would keep her from walking away again? The answer: Nothing, if she gets tired of it. But Liu wants to skate, and this is her way of leveling up. “The vibe of my life right now? It’s giving skating,” she says. “Getting people to feel something is so rare — it’s my favorite thing about every art form and every sport, to be honest.”

She wants to take dance classes and work on her artistry off the ice. “Having a tango program is an excuse to do tango lessons! I’m looking forward to that, like, more than anything.” What will her trainer cook up for her this year in the gym, without the constraints of competition? She wants to work on doing triple axels again.

How Liu shows up in the skating world this year will go beyond the competition circuit. She began a partnership with UN Women, launching an honest, affecting campaign that peels back the curtain on the difficulties that women and girls experience in sports.

“It feels important for the people who work with young girls to know what not to do,” she tells me. Recent high-profile scandals in many sports — including skating, gymnastics, and track and field — have raised serious questions about the health of young athletes and how they could be better protected from physical and emotional harm. “Most girls quit by 14 — twice as much as boys — because of body image issues,” she says. “I’m a cautionary tale.”

Liu notes that the media narrative around female skaters has always been hyperfocused on rivalry. In Milan, the genuine closeness she had with her U.S. teammates Amber Glenn and Isabeau Levito stood out, and they owned it. The trio’s nickname was the Blade Angels — a Charlie’s Angels–on-skates reference dreamt up by Liu. She emphasizes that the kind of friendship and support they continue to give to one another, and to other competitors, is critical to skating’s future.

This year, she’ll be cheering from the stands. “I’m excited to see them shine from a different place,” she says. “I get to be a spectator — a fan.

“Looking at it really big-picture, this is the best thing I can do with my career,” she adds after a moment. “To make sure that there is sportsmanship in every corner of it. That’s the only way skating will evolve.”

Talking to her about negotiating the self — as an athlete, artist, and human — alongside something that’s bigger than the self — a public figure — reminds me of a moment from the day we’d spent together in June. It was getting close to golden hour atop Grizzly Peak, a scenic overlook in the hills above Berkeley where Liu was doing a photo shoot. During a break, we walked downslope to survey the panorama of San Francisco Bay.

A couple of college-age boys approached cautiously and courteously to ask if they might take a photo with Liu. She glanced at them, then down at her clothing. She smiled sheepishly and gestured at her Britney Spears T-shirt and vintage Issey Miyake tartan skirt in a manner that suggested a top-secret fashion shoot. “Actually, I’m not allowed,” she said. “Sorry!” Her tone was kind and tinged with regret.

Learning to say no, gracefully and without guilt, is one way she’s growing. But Liu’s old soul is her compass. It always has been. But now she knows it — and knows to trust it.

In between takes, under the eucalyptus trees, I watched her dance alone, to an internal music only she could hear. ●