Alysa Liu became the youngest U.S. champion ever at 13, retired at 16, spent two years living a normal life, then came back to win the 2025 World Championships and, on February 19, 2026, Olympic gold in Milan. She is the first American woman to win the Olympic title since Sarah Hughes in 2002, and she did it on her own terms.
Photo: SpiritedMichelle, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
Key takeaways
- Liu won Olympic gold in Milan with 226.79 points, ahead of Kaori Sakamoto (224.90) and Ami Nakai (219.16), and added team event gold with Team USA.
- She is the eighth American woman to win the Olympic women's title, and the first since Sarah Hughes in 2002.
- She won the U.S. title at 13 in 2019, the youngest ever, and retired in April 2022 at 16.
- Her comeback began with a ski trip in early 2024; she won Worlds in 2025 and the Grand Prix Final in December 2025.
The gold at twenty
On February 19, 2026, in Milan, Alysa Liu took the ice for her Olympic free skate. She was 20 years old, and less than two years earlier she had still been retired from the sport. She reeled off seven triples in a joyful "MacArthur Park Suite" performance that had the Milan crowd on its feet by the final minute.
When it was over, she had 150.20 points in the free skate and a total of 226.79, enough to win Olympic gold. It made her the first American woman to win the Olympic title since Sarah Hughes in 2002, 24 years earlier, and only the eighth American woman ever. It also made her one of the great comeback stories in Olympic history. "I literally can't process this," she said afterward.
Kaori Sakamoto took silver with 224.90, and Japan's Ami Nakai took bronze with 219.16. Liu had already won gold with Team USA in the team event, so she left Milan with two gold medals. The question everyone wanted answered was simple: how does a teenage champion walk away, spend two years away, and come back better than ever?
The prodigy
Alysa Liu was born on August 8, 2005, in Clovis, California. Her father, Arthur Liu, took part in the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square and later came to the United States as a political refugee. Alysa grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and started skating at the Oakland Ice Center at age 5, where her first coach, Laura Lipetsky, would remain a key figure in her career.
By her early teens, Liu was landing jumps that older, more experienced skaters couldn't, and she was fearless in a sport that often asks young women to be cautious. In January 2019, at 13, she won the U.S. Championships, becoming the youngest U.S. champion ever and breaking the record of Tara Lipinski, who was 14 when she won in 1997. The skating world had found its next prodigy.
That August, at the Junior Grand Prix in Lake Placid, the 14-year-old became the first American woman to land a quadruple Lutz, and the first woman in the world to land a quad and a triple axel in the same program. In January 2020, still 14, she defended her national title.
Landing a quad Lutz in competition is exceptionally rare, and pairing it with a triple axel, when few women in the world could do either, showed she might be generational. The expectations only grew from there.
Beijing, spies, and burnout
Liu made the 2022 Olympic team for Beijing at 16, and it should have been pure triumph. Instead it was shadowed by what happened off the ice: in March 2022, the U.S. Justice Department charged five men accused of acting on behalf of the Chinese government in schemes against dissidents in the United States, and one alleged plot involved spying on her father.
Arthur Liu said the FBI had warned him in October 2021, just as his daughter was preparing for the Games. A 16-year-old shouldn't have to think about international espionage while getting ready for the Olympics, but she did. In Beijing she finished sixth in the individual event, and she didn't skate in the team event.
A month later she won bronze at the 2022 World Championships, the first world medal for a U.S. woman since Ashley Wagner's silver in 2016. But being a teenage phenom had taken its toll. On April 9, 2022, she posted on Instagram: "I'm here to announce that I am retiring from skating." She added, "now that i'm finally done with my goals in skating i'm going to be moving on with my life." She was 16 years old.
The years away
For two years, Alysa Liu wasn't Alysa Liu the skater; she was just Alysa. She enrolled at UCLA, and in May 2023 she trekked to Mount Everest base camp, at about 17,500 feet, with her best friend and her friend's mother. "It definitely tested our friendship and our physical strength," she said later, calling it "the best trip I've ever been on."
There were no competitions and no pressure to land quads. There was just a normal life, or as normal as a former Olympian's can be, and the space to figure out who she was when she wasn't the prodigy, the phenom, or the youngest champion.
The comeback
The spark came from an unexpected place. On a ski trip to Lake Tahoe in January 2024, the speed and the cold reminded Liu of skating, the first time she'd felt that rush since she quit. In March 2024 she announced her comeback on Instagram with a video of her training jumps, determined to do it on her own terms, with her own music, her own costumes, and her own say.
She trained with coach Phillip DiGuglielmo and with Massimo Scali, and in October 2024 she competed at the Budapest Trophy, her first competition since March 2022, leading after the short program. By March 2025, at the World Championships in Boston, she was world champion, the first American woman to win Worlds since Kimmie Meissner in 2006.
Her Olympic season kept building. She won Skate America, then the Grand Prix Final in Nagoya in December 2025 with 222.49 points. At the U.S. Championships in January 2026 she took silver with 228.91 behind Amber Glenn, who won her third straight title, and both women were named to the Olympic team.
A music change on the road to Milan
If the comeback was smooth on the ice, the road to Milan had one bump off it. In September 2025, Liu scrapped a short program set to "This Is How It Feels," performed by Laufey and D4vd, after D4vd became the subject of a police investigation. Changing a program that close to an Olympic season is risky, because skaters need time to absorb new choreography, but Liu had the skill and maturity to adapt.
Her free skate stayed the same: Donna Summer's "MacArthur Park Suite," a song written by Jimmy Webb. It's a big, theatrical, disco-tinged piece, very different from the classical or ballad choices many elite women make, and it fit the joyful, self-directed skater Liu had become. Our post on the music rules of figure skating explains how skaters choose and change their music.
Olympic gold in Milan
Liu's Olympics began in the team event, where she skated the women's short program and finished second to Sakamoto, while Amber Glenn skated the free skate. Team USA won gold by a single point over Japan, sealed by Ilia Malinin in the men's free skate. In the individual short program on February 17, Liu scored 76.59 and sat third, behind Japan's Ami Nakai (78.71) and Sakamoto (77.23).
In the free skate on February 19, she delivered her "MacArthur Park Suite" with seven triples and the full-body commitment that had the arena on its feet, scoring 150.20 for a total of 226.79. Sakamoto, skating after her, scored 147.67 for 224.90 and silver, and Nakai held on for bronze. Alysa Liu was an Olympic champion.
| Competition | Result | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2022 Beijing Olympics | 6th | Did not skate in the team event |
| 2022 World Championships | Bronze | First world medal for a U.S. woman since 2016 |
| 2025 World Championships | Gold | First U.S. women's world title since 2006 |
| 2025 Grand Prix Final | Gold | 222.49 points |
| 2026 Olympics, team event | Gold | Second in the women's short program |
| 2026 Olympics, individual | Gold | 76.59 + 150.20 = 226.79 points |
Alysa Liu: quick facts
| Born | August 8, 2005, Clovis, California |
|---|---|
| Started skating | Age 5, Oakland Ice Center |
| Coaches | Phillip DiGuglielmo and Massimo Scali; first coach Laura Lipetsky |
| Olympic medals | 2: individual gold and team gold (2026) |
| World titles | 1: 2025, Boston |
| U.S. titles | 2: 2019 (age 13) and 2020 (age 14) |
| 2025-26 free skate | "MacArthur Park Suite," Donna Summer |
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| August 2005 | Born in Clovis, California |
| About 2010 | Starts skating at the Oakland Ice Center at age 5 |
| January 2019 | Wins the U.S. title at 13, the youngest ever |
| August 2019 | First woman to land a quad and a triple axel in the same program |
| January 2020 | Defends her U.S. title at 14 |
| February 2022 | Sixth at the Beijing Olympics |
| March 2022 | World Championship bronze |
| April 2022 | Announces her retirement on Instagram at 16 |
| May 2023 | Treks to Everest base camp |
| March 2024 | Announces her comeback |
| October 2024 | Returns to competition at the Budapest Trophy |
| March 2025 | Wins the World Championships in Boston |
| December 2025 | Wins the Grand Prix Final |
| February 2026 | Wins Olympic team and individual gold in Milan |
The Adults Skate Too take
Alysa Liu is 20 and already one of the great comeback stories in sport. What makes her story resonate for adult skaters is that she didn't come back because she had to; she came back because she wanted to, on her own terms. At 16 she chose to walk away, at 18 she chose to come back, and in between she did exactly what she needed to do: she lived.
She went to college, she climbed to Everest base camp, and she found out who she was when she wasn't the prodigy. When she returned, it was different. She had a say in her music, her costumes, and her choreography, a kind of agency she didn't have at 13 or 14, when she was just trying to survive being famous before she was old enough to drive.
For anyone who walked away from something they loved, her career is proof that a break doesn't have to end a career; sometimes it transforms it. Liu's second act is more joyful than her first, and that joy is visible in every program she skates.
That's the lesson for adult skaters, too: your timeline is yours, and there's no deadline. Come back when you're genuinely ready, and if you never come back, that's okay too. If you're returning after years away, our guide to coming back to figure skating as an adult covers rebuilding slowly, because muscle memory is real but so is the need to ease back in.
Then she won Olympic gold, in music she loved, at an age when many skaters are already thinking about life after skating. Alysa Liu walked away at 16 and came back better. If you needed proof that that's possible, here it is. For more from Milan, see our full recap of figure skating at the 2026 Olympics, and if you want to know what all those jump names mean, our guide to every figure skating jump explains them.
Sources
Results and quotes come from the site's Rink Report coverage of Milano Cortina 2026, checked against official results and news reports. An earlier version of this story included details we could not confirm, and they have been corrected or removed.
- Milano Cortina 2026 official results: women's singles and team event.
- U.S. Figure Skating, "Alysa Liu becomes first American woman to land quadruple Lutz in Junior Grand Prix win," August 2019.
- Associated Press, coverage of Liu's April 2022 retirement and her March 2024 comeback announcement.
- Associated Press, coverage of the March 2022 Justice Department case involving Arthur Liu.
- U.S. Figure Skating, "Liu reaches new heights on and off the ice," July 2025.
- ISU and Golden Skate coverage of the 2025 Grand Prix Final and the 2026 U.S. Championships.
