Alysa Liu ready to show off her freewheeling new outlook on Olympic stage

The aerial acrobat who once was Alysa Liu is gone.

Long gone.

Eight years have passed since Liu, of Richmond, burst into the figure skating universe with a show-stopping performance as a 12-year-old jumping phenom at the 2018 U.S. championships in San Jose.

Since then, the skating prodigy endured the rollercoaster of adolescence, briefly stepped away from the ice, and has transformed into a polished performer as she heads into her second Olympics with raccoon-striped hair, frenulum piercings on her front teeth, and an outsized personality.

Liu, 20, is part of a trio of American women with big expectations for the Milano-Cortina Games that begin with the mixed team competition on Friday as the Winter Olympics kick off.

Her return marks the fourth consecutive time a woman skater from the Bay Area has qualified for the Olympics, starting in 2014 with Polina Edmunds of San Jose. Karen Chen of Fremont competed at the Pyeongchang Games in 2018, and Chen and Liu represented the United States four years ago in Beijing.

The aura surrounding Liu feels dramatically different heading into Italy, where she is considered a serious medal contender as reigning world and Grand Prix Finale champion.

For starters, figure skating no longer consumes her life, freeing Liu to enjoy the stage more than ever.

“I really don’t have any anxiety,” she said in a November teleconference. “In order for me to be anxious about something, it would have to mean I’m really counting on it or depending on it.”

Liu now focuses on artistic performance rather than on achieving specific results.

“There’s no way to go wrong with that – even with mistakes, art that can still be beautiful, and it’s still a story,” she said.

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By the time she made her Olympic debut, at age 16, Liu had cemented her place in Bay Area skating lore.

At age 12, she became the youngest skater in history to land a triple Axel – a 3 1/2-rotation jump – in international competition.

At 13, she became the youngest woman to win a U.S. Championship and also became the first American woman to execute three triple Axels in a single competition.

In the same season, Liu became the first U.S. woman to land a quadruple jump in a competition and the first in the world to hit a quad and triple Axel in the same program at a competition.

She is the youngest skater to win back-to-back U.S. titles, in 2019-20.

Those achievements seem like faded memories as Liu returns to the Olympics on an unorthodox path she has orchestrated.

“She has always been very independent and a free spirit, so that explains a lot of the decisions that she made in her career,” father Arthur Liu recently told the Bay Area News Group.

Her life was changing by the time Liu earned a discretionary Olympic berth after withdrawing from the 2022 U.S. championships when she tested positive for COVID-19.

Liu surprised fans when retiring a month after earning a bronze medal at the ‘22 World Championships. She had had enough of a one-dimensional life where she spent hours training at the Oakland Ice Center or studying at her father’s law practice a few blocks away.

“Now that I’ve come back, I really have so much control over my life,” she said in November.

Liu had planned the exit 1 ½ years earlier, according to Arthur Liu, an Oakland immigration lawyer who left China in his 20s because he had protested the Communist government after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

“As a parent, I can only do so much,” the father said. “Sometimes things are just out of my control.”

Liu enrolled at UCLA, where she is majoring in psychology. In May 2023, she joined her best friend, Shay Newton, and her mother, Eve Rodler, from the Oakland Hills, on an expedition to Mount Everest base camp.

Liu felt rejuvenated while sculpting a life away from the rink.

The itch to compete, however, returned six months after trekking in the Himalayas. After not skating for 1 ½ years, Liu began training again in March 2024 while attending classes at UCLA.

She rehired previous coaches Phillip DiGuglielmo and Massimo Scali to guide her.

“She figured it out herself what she wanted to do, so she decided to come back on her own,” said Arthur Liu, who had all five of his children with anonymous egg donors and surrogate mothers.

But not even Liu’s coaches knew what to expect because comebacks at the elite level have rarely succeeded.

“When she came back to the sport, no longer a little girl, it was hard for anyone to picture what was really possible in such a short span of time and what it would be like,” said Edmunds, the 2014 Olympian.

Liu performed as if she never had left even without the big jumps.

In January, she finished second to Amber Glenn in the U.S. Championships for the second consecutive year. Liu won the 2025 World Championship title ahead of Olympic teammates Isabeau Levito (fourth) and Glenn (fifth).

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Liu and her coaches sometimes train at the three-decade-old Yerba Buena Ice Skating Center in downtown San Francisco.

They often share the facility with 1988 Olympic champion Brian Boitano, Olympic bronze medalist Jeremy Abbott and Edmunds in what can look like a Bay Area hall of fame day.

“She just has a very laid-back nature,” Edmunds said of Liu. “She’s working hard. She’s doing what she’s supposed to be doing, but there isn’t any visible stress. You can tell that she is enjoying the work.”

The scene in San Francisco harkens to the days when a prepubescent girl leaped around the Oakland Ice Center as if nothing bothered her.

As an exuberant 4-foot-6-inch preteen, all Liu could talk about was triple Axels and quadruple jumps in an era when Russian skaters dominated the sport with dazzling spinning rotations.

Liu represented the lone American willing to match the world’s most technically advanced skaters. But she also aspired to find the delicate balance between the serene artistry on ice and athletic jumps.

These days, the music she skates to brings Liu the greatest joy.

“If I really love what I’m listening to, my body just moves,” she said. “I want my programs to feel personal. It would feel weird to do something that isn’t really me, like that just wouldn’t be fun.”

For the short program this season, Liu chose “Promise” by Laufey Lin Bing Jonsdottir, an Icelandic-Chinese singer and musician.

“I remember I used to cry to it all the time, even when I wasn’t skating,” Liu said. “Laufey’s voice really does something to me.”

In typical Liu fashion, she boldly debuted a free skate to Lady Gaga music in the U.S. Championships. But the skater said she plans to return to her tried-and-true “MacArthur Park” program for the Olympics.

The only question is whether the 5-foot-2 Liu might add a high-scoring triple Axel to the routine.

“It’s such a satisfying jump,” she said in November. But Liu has not indicated whether she will try it.

And it doesn’t matter anymore.

“Let’s say I’m at the Olympics and I mess up on a jump, a few jumps, or something, and I just totally do bad,” she said. “No medal. Bottom placement. That just doesn’t seem like a horrible situation. I’d still be OK with that.”

The healthy outlook coursing through Liu’s veins jumps out on the ice.

A whimsical smile. A hint of mischief. A commanding, emotional performance.

“To her, skating is an art and competitions are opportunities for her to perform,” Arthur Liu said.

Cue the music.