‘What Is There to Lose?’ Alysa Liu on Making an Olympic Comeback After Retiring at 16

Even if you’re not a dedicated figure-skating fan, you’ll easily recognize Alysa Liu when she takes to the ice in Milan as part of the U.S. women’s Olympic figure-skating team. She’s the one with the horizontal blonde and brown stripes in her hair.

Liu, 21, says the stripes are like the rings on a tree, and she’s been adding a blonde one every year since 2023. But she stands out for more than her unique do. At 13, she became the youngest U.S. women’s champion, and the first U.S. woman to land three triple axels—one of the most challenging jumps female skaters perform—in a single competition. At 14, she became the first U.S. woman to land a quadruple jump in competition.

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Liu made the Olympic team in 2022 and competed in Beijing, finishing sixth.

She then retired from the sport—at age 16.

“Quitting was definitely, and still to this day, one of my best decisions ever,” she said at the Team USA Media Summit in October. “I just had to try a bunch of other things, and at the time, I thought the only way for me to do that was to leave because I really felt trapped and stuck.” After years of spending so much time on the ice, and being coached and instructed by the adults in her life on everything from what to wear to what to eat, Liu yearned to make some of her own decisions and experience life outside of the rink. “I’ve been through so many midlife crises, and I’m, like, 20,” she says. 

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She enrolled at the University of California Los Angeles, focusing on psychology, and put skating behind her. She traveled to the Himalayas with her best friend and best friend’s mother, trekking to base camp on Mount Everest in 2023. For almost two years, she didn’t step on the ice. But it turned out to be harder to quit the rink than she anticipated. Without telling her family or friends, she began skating again, once in a while, “for quick hits of dopamine,” she said on 60 Minutes. Those sessions reinforced her love of the sport, and reignited her desire to compete. 

After a ski trip in 2024 reinforced that drive, she called her former coaches Phillip DiGuglielmo and Massimo Scali in Oakland, where she had trained prior to retiring, and told them she wanted to return to competitive skating. Over a nearly two-hour virtual call, DiGuglielmo tried to talk her out of it. But for every reason DiGuglielmo provided, Liu had a response—to his concern that she was older now and training would be more challenging, for instance, she reminded him that she would be only 21 at the next Olympics. She made it clear that she wanted to have more say in her training and her programs, and most importantly, that she would be competing again because she wanted to, not because she had no other choice.

Always a talented jumper, it didn’t take long for Liu to regain her technique and start mastering high-level skills again. “Her jumps were still there, and that was the most amazing part of her coming back for us too, that her rotations were still a natural part of what she feels,” says Scali.

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But she is a different skater than when she was 16, says Scali, as she now has more power and maturity. That means her jumps launch higher in the air, and that, combined with her naturally rapid rotation rate, gives her a significant edge over many of her competitors. “She has a gift,” says Scali. “One of her best qualities is how quickly she can rotate the jump. And now that she has the power to bring the jumps pretty high, her jumps are actually bigger and cleaner than when she was little.”

She began training to compete in the 2024-25 competitive circuit, a year before the Olympic season, and jaded skating commentators focused on the rarity of successful comebacks. But Liu proved them wrong. At her first competition, a Challenger Series event in October 2024 that served as a test of where her skills stood, and an opportunity to earn much-needed points in order to compete in the more elite Grand Prix series, Liu placed first. She finished a respectable sixth and fourth at her next Grand Prix events and earned silver at her first U.S. championships in four years (she withdrew from the 2022 event before the Olympics after testing positive for COVID).

Two months later, in March 2025, Liu won her first world championship title, which convinced her—and the skating community—that her comeback was real and put her in strong contention for a spot on the 2026 Olympic team.

At the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in January, which doubled as the Olympic trials, Liu made a risky decision. She had been using older routines for her short and long programs but chose to debut a new long program at the competition. Adjusting to new music and refining the interstitial steps between big elements like jumps and spins is often a season-long process, not something a skater would typically do on a much shorter timeline with an Olympic berth on the line. But Liu’s gamble paid off: She earned silver with two clean programs and a spot on the team heading to Milan. 

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The decision reflects the new Liu, less concerned with conforming to norms and more focused on following her inner compass. She is skating not necessarily for points or medals, but simply because she missed it so much. “Anywhere that has an audience, get me there, I will skate,” she says. And despite the added pressure that often accompanies a comeback, Liu is remarkably calm about her second Olympics. “I don’t think anything is going to be hard about the Olympics,” she says. “What is there to lose? Every second you are there, you are gaining something. I can’t think of anything that I would find stressful or anything that could bring me down.”

Liu is bringing that mentality to Milan, along with her quirky sense of humor and ability to think creatively. At a press conference after nationals, in response to a question about who her picks would be for skating the women’s short and long programs in the team event at the Olympics, she immediately veered into an entertaining pitch for subbing teammate Amber Glenn into the men’s short program and for her and teammate Isabeau Levito to skate both the short and long programs for pairs. “We can handle both,” she said.

Liu is undoubtedly one of the top women’s skaters in the world. One of her jump combinations, a triple lutz-triple loop, earns among the highest points in women’s skating, and Liu’s speed and ease in flowing from the first jump immediately into the second with nothing to propel her but her own momentum, often earns her additional points for execution. She hasn’t competed with the triple axel since her comeback and remains coy about whether she will unveil it at the Winter Games. “She practices it every day,” says Scali. “And she’s landing the triple axel again. But it’s a very complicated jump and landing a triple axel, then landing it with consistency, and then being able to put it into a program are three different stages. But she really wants to bring the triple axel back, so we keep it open.” 

Just another surprise that Liu may spring on the world when she takes the ice in Milan.