Alysa Liu adds her name to Bay Area’s Olympic skating icons

Alysa Liu joined the realm of Bay Area figure skating legends Thursday when her extraordinary free skate program earned her Olympic gold at the Milan Cortina Games.

The 20-year-old Liu, once the youngest skater to win the U.S. championships, had icons of Northern California skating cheering her on in Italy: Kristi Yamaguchi and Brian Boitano were watching together from inside the arena as Liu ended the American skating gold drought of 24 years.

Vincent Zhou, a South Bay native who won gold in the team event at the 2022 Olympics, called Liu’s return to the ice “the greatest modern comeback story in the sport” in an Instagram Story celebrating her gold.

That story included a retirement at age 16, a journey of self-discovery and an embrace of a carefree outlook that helped her shake off the pressure of the international stage.

She’s the fourth Bay Area skater to win individual gold at the Winter Olympics, and the seventh medalist from the region overall, counting Karen Chen, who was on the 2022 U.S. team alongside Zhou.

Here’s a look at the individual medalists who came before her:

Peggy Fleming

Fleming, born and raised in San Jose, became the third American woman to win Olympic gold when she finished first at the 1968 Grenoble Games. She won world championships in 1966, 1967 and 1968 and captured the bronze medal at the 1965 world championships. She retired from competition in 1968 and took to the ice in professional touring shows. Fleming, now 77, was inducted into the San Jose Sports Hall of Fame in 1996. She has been a longtime promoter of the sport, commentating for ABC in the years after her Olympic triumph, and helped bring the U.S. figure skating championships to San Jose in 2012.

Charles Tickner

Tickner was raised in Lafayette and was not on the national radar as a youth, like many top skaters are. He didn’t start competing seriously until he was 18, and the failure to make the 1976 Olympic team further kick-started his progression. The next year, he won the U.S. title, and a year later he was the world champion. At the Lake Placid Olympics in 1980, coming off a fourth consecutive national championship, he claimed bronze.

Brian Boitano

Boitano, who grew up in Mountain View and attended Peterson High in Sunnyvale (now a middle school), won the men’s singles gold medal in the 1988 Games in Calgary, Alberta. He became the first Olympic champion to land the full complement of six types of triple jumps in what entering the Games was billed as the Battle of the Brians with Canada’s Brian Orser, to took the bronze medal. Boitano, 62, won the World Championships twice, including in 1988, and won four straight U.S. singles championships from 1985-88.

Debi Thomas

Thomas, who was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, but grew up in San Jose, won the world championship in 1986 and was among the favorites at the Calgary Olympics in 1988. She had a rivalry with East German Katarina Witt dubbed the “Battle of the Carmens” because both skated to the music of Georges Bizet’s opera “Carmen” in their long programs. Witt won the gold at the Calgary Games and Thomas took the bronze, with Canada’s Elizabeth Manley capturing the silver. Thomas, now 58, earned an engineering degree from Stanford in 1991, then went to medical school at Northwestern. She became an orthopedic surgeon.

Kristi Yamaguchi

Yamaguchi was born in Fremont and, inspired in part by watching Fleming, took to the ice at a young age. Doctors told her skating could help with her clubfoot, a condition she had at birth. She attended Mission San Jose High School in Fremont and won the junior pairs title in 1988 with partner Rudy Galindo. Two years later, she swept the junior individual and pairs titles, cementing herself as a true rising star. She won the 1991 world title in Munich, then her first U.S. title in the weeks before the 1992 Games in Albertville, France. Yamaguchi, now 54, was on the U.S. team with Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, but she came out ahead of them and Japan’s Midori Ito to earn gold.

Yamaguchi has previously cited the influence of the medalists before her as she grew into a top-level figure skater.

“There were times when Brian would come by the rink when I was a teenager,” Yamaguchi told this news organization in 2010. “Everyone was in awe. He was a big role model and example for all of us. Same with Debi. It was a feeling of being lucky to have these people right in the Bay Area and look up to, to see how hard they train. That was pretty inspiring.”

Now, another generation of young Bay Area skaters has an Olympic gold medalist to follow.