How did Alysa Liu get to this point, to where she is skating in this weekend’s Budapest Trophy in Hungary, her first real competition in two and a half years?
How and why did she return to the spotlight after purposefully retreating to the shadows, her break from being ALYSA LIU (drum roll) so complete that she also broke from social media, then began posting photos in which alysa liu (whisper) often turned her face from the camera or made it indistinct.
At age 13, Liu had stood the figure skating world on its head. At 16, soon after skating at the 2022 Winter Olympics and winning a bronze medal at the 2022 World Championships, Liu retired from the sport.
She did some post-Olympic shows and did not skate at all for nearly a year and a half. At 19, a sophomore at UCLA, she is competing again.
Talk about things turning upside down.
It did not matter that her once-and-current coach, Phillip DiGuglielmo, forcefully reminded Liu how difficult training and competing had been in the past when she first broached the subject of a comeback to him last winter. And now she would be making it exponentially more difficult by doing it while a full-time college student.
“I tried every single thing I could tell her about why she shouldn’t do it,” DiGuglielmo said. “She had a reason to counter every one of my points.
“I said, ‘Other people have tried this, and it didn’t work. She said, ‘But they’re all older than me.’ I said, ‘OK, but it’s really hard to get back to worlds,’ and she said, ‘No, I can do it.’”
Then he sighed, realizing, “She had really thought this out.”
When she left the sport, leaving her skates to rust (literally) in her family’s home near Oakland, California, Liu suddenly had time to think things through and see her future through different perspectives.
Freed of worries about injuring herself or losing competition shape, she allowed herself to experience new things: a first-ever vacation, a trek in the Himalayas, a Christmas 2023 ski trip to Lake Tahoe on which she told a friend’s mother, “I really miss being an athlete. I think I want to try to go back to skating.”
And yet, while it had not been startling when she decided to retire, her return was shockingly unexpected.
“I was surprised,” said her best friend, Shay Newton, a former skater, when Liu first mentioned it during the ski trip. “But I definitely understood her reasoning.”
Skiing was the first thing Liu had done that was even remotely similar to skating. She liked how it felt to be on skis.
“Comparing them is a stretch,” Liu said, `but I was like, ‘Skiing is really fun. Maybe skating is fun, too. Maybe I should skate a session and see what the feeling is like.’”
A few days after the ski trip, she called DiGuglielmo to tell him that she and Newton would be doing a 6 a.m. session at the Yerba Buena rink in San Francisco. He showed up to watch and said, “Be careful. I don’t need you hurting yourself.’’ She still did a double Axel and a triple toe loop.
They were alone on the ice. They took a group picture, and Liu insisted DiGuglielmo not post it. It was all on the down low then. And the coach expected nothing more to come of the session, thinking it was like a final fling with her old sport.
A couple months later, after Liu had done a couple more public sessions near UCLA and tried more difficult jumps, she called DiGuglielmo to say she wanted to compete again. He thought she meant low-key competitions with the UCLA club team.
“I thought that would be great,” he said. “(Two-time Olympian) Karen Chen competes for Cornell, and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be a fun collegiate competition to have two Olympians in it.’ Then Alysa said, ‘No, I want to really compete.’ And she wanted Massimo (Scali) and I to coach her.
“That,” he said, laughing, “is when I knew I was in trouble.”
That DiGuglielmo and Scali were back in the picture seemed both incongruous and a sign of a new dynamic in Team Liu.
Liu’s father, Arthur, had fired them (and Jeremy Abbott) as her coaches about three months before the Olympics, leading her to leave her Bay Area training base and move temporarily to Colorado Springs, where Drew Meekins and Viktor Pfeifer took over her coaching.
They would be her third different coaching team since Arthur Liu decided in 2020 that his daughter should split from Laura Lipetsky, who had taken her from a 5-year-old kid to a young teen with two senior U.S. titles.
“Alysa is our boss,” DiGuglielmo said. “She is an adult, and she came to us and hired us. She is in charge.”
Scali, the three-time Italian Olympic ice dancer who choreographed her new competition programs, sees the difference in the way Liu took control of all parts of this season.
“She has been much more engaged in the process of creating the program from beginning to end – from picking the music, to every aspect of the choreography, to her dress and hair and makeup,” Scali said. “She knows what she wants and how she wants to represent what she is doing on the ice.”
Her program music is from two melancholy songs about heartbreak, but she changes the mood of the free skate choice, “MacArthur Park,” by using Donna Summer’s version, which goes from downbeat to disco. The short program music, “Promise” by Laufey, ironically begins, “I made a promise / to distance myself.”
Alysa Liu’s trip to Mount Everest Base Camp
It had all happened so fast for Alysa Liu the first time around.
Less than six months after turning 13, she became the youngest women’s senior national champion and the first U.S. woman to land a triple Axel in a short program at nationals.
Yet during that 2018-19 season, she was still below the minimum age for junior international competition and three seasons short of being able to skate in senior international events. And too short, then 4 feet, 6 inches tall, to climb onto the top step of the medals podium without a hand from the silver and bronze medalists.
By the next nationals, in which she became the youngest two-time champion at 14, Liu had become the first U.S. woman to land a quadruple jump in competition and finished second at the Junior Grand Prix Final.
A month later, she would win bronze at the World Junior Championships. A month after that, Covid would shut down international figure skating events for the end of the 2020 season and render them domestic events for nearly all of the next season.
Liu, who had made the first coaching change after the 2020 season, suddenly went from living in the whirlwind of success and intimations of 2022 Olympic glory to being stalemated in pandemic limbo — with a balky hip, to boot.
“I was so into skating that I really didn’t do much else,” she said. “Skating takes up your while life, almost. I don’t know if other people kind of feel the same when they look back at certain parts of their life, but for me, it’s definitely a blur, because it kind of meshes together, you know -- going to the rink, going home, competing.
“There were many, many times when I didn’t enjoy it.”
That’s one way to say she was sick of skating. Liu decided about a year before the 2022 Olympics that she would walk away from the sport soon after they were over if she made the U.S. team. She wanted to do other things — go to movies, take a vacation, go to in-person school for the first time since beginning home schooling in sixth grade. She planned a gap year before heading to college at UCLA in the fall of 2023.
“She was definitely sure it was time for a break,” said Newton, a Haverford College sophomore.
In the 2022 Olympics, Liu finished a solid seventh, best of the three U.S. women. She followed with a bronze at the World Championships, the first U.S. woman to get a worlds singles medal since Ashley Wagner six years earlier (and just the second since 2006).
She announced her retirement two weeks after worlds, then toured with Stars on Ice in the spring and The Ice: Japan in the summer. After her final Japan performance July 31, she took off her skates, seemingly for good.
“She felt she had kept up her side of the bargain with her father and the skating community in general, which was always to go to the Olympics and be the skater everyone wanted her to be,” DiGuglielmo said. “After she achieved those goals, it was time for her to leave the sport on her own terms, on a high.”
Without time constraints, Liu did both the mundane, hanging out with friends, and the memorable, a 17-day trip in Nepal with 11 days of trekking to and from Mount Everest Base Camp in May 2023.
Newton’s mother, UC-Davis oncologist Eve Rodler, suggested the trip. No matter that Liu had avoided serious exercise for nearly a year and had never done serious hiking at altitude, she jumped at the offer to join Newton, Rodler and two other friends on the expedition.
“I love a good challenge,” Liu said.
Starting in Lukla, Nepal, at 9,383 feet above sea level, they hiked about eight hours a day, overnighting at mountain teahouses, covering the 40 uphill miles to Base Camp (17,598 feet) in eight days and the downhill return in three. The higher they got, the more difficult it became to choose between wearing a balaclava for warmth or keeping the mouth and nose uncovered for easier breathing in the thinning air.
“Alysa and Shay just skipped up the mountain,” Rodler said. “They were very strong, actually.”
Liu clearly was up to the challenge.
“I think I’m naturally kind of a competitive person,” she said.
No wonder DiGuglielmo had no reservations about naming the Liu team’s FaceTime group chat, “Alysa Team 2026,” emphasizing that the 2026 Winter Games are their goal. He also has no reservations about saying a Liu medal at this year’s U.S. Championships is “highly realistic.”
That would also be very fast.
‘I’m not basing my worth off skating’
Liu began training seriously again back in the Bay Area after her first year at UCLA ended in late spring. She was in no shape to think about competing or even running a full program. Some days, she would do a jump and then need several minutes to recover before trying another. She did one minor competition at her Oakland club in early September, managing to land three clean triple jumps in the free skate.
“It made me eager for more competitions,” Liu said.
Yet there were times even before committing fully to a comeback when she wondered if it was a good idea.
“One of my friends said, `You should just do it because you’re still young, and you won’t really be able to make this decision later. And you don’t want to regret anything,’” Liu recalled.
The process got more complicated once she returned to UCLA in late September. Liu, a psychology major, has three classes this quarter.
She trains at Lakewood Ice, a 30-mile trip down the notoriously congested Los Angeles area freeways. DiGuglielmo or Scali will try to get there from the Bay Area as often as possible, with Lakewood-based Amy Evidente and Ivan Dinev handling her coaching on other days.
Liu will also go back to the Bay Area as often as possible, starting with most of the five-week stretch that includes Budapest and her two scheduled Grand Prix appearances, Skate Canada and NHK Trophy.
“I’m enjoying training again,” she said. “Obviously, it’s a struggle, but I’m enjoying the struggle right now. After training, I’m ready to see friends and go to school and study.
“There is so much more I look forward to now. Before, when I had only skating, it was too repetitive.”
Women’s singles skating has become friendlier to women of a certain age in the two seasons since the Russians were barred from international competition after their country’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine.
The Russians were dominating the sport on the strength of young teens doing high-risk, high-scoring jumps — quads and triple Axels. None of the medalists in the last two world championships tried anything harder than a triple Lutz.
Liu said the absence of the Russians did not influence her comeback decision. She is practicing triple Axels, but it is unlikely she will try one this season. Before leaving for Budapest, DiGuglielmo said her planned free skate for that Challenger Series event includes six triple jumps, with two triple-triple combinations.
“She’s stronger, she’s faster, and it’s just because her body is stronger, her muscles are stronger,” DiGuglielmo said.
The time off helped her hip to heal. It also helped her see the second time around from a different perspective. She hopes to manage the tricky balance between school and sport well enough this season to stay at UCLA through at least the start of the 2026 Olympic season.
Eve Rodler has planned another Nepal trek for next May. She knows Liu may have to skip it.
“The figure skating is a priority, right?” Rodler said.
Right. A priority. But no longer the only one.
“It’s not that I took it too serious before,” Liu said. “It’s that I’m not basing my worth off skating, because I have another part of me now.”
Philip Hersh is a special contributor to NBCSports.com. He has covered figure skating at the last 12 Winter Olympics.
