American figure skater Alysa Liu is leaving the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan with two gold medals, one for Team USA as a whole and one for her as an individual. Making her the first American woman to win a medal in singles since 2006. Besides her striped hair, Alysa is a little different from the other figure skaters at the Olympics–she looks like she’s having fun. Her teammates and peers collapse under the Olympic pressure–Ilia Malinin, namely, missing numerous elements. What made Alysa unique was her disposition to the Olympic Games, which can all be explained by one thing: skating on her own terms.
Alysa was raised by a single father in Oakland, California, a Chinese immigrant who fled China as a political refugee after participating in the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests, protests which pushed for democracy in China. Alysa has skated since she was a child and won nationals at age thirteen. She went to her first Olympics in 2022, scoring sixth place, before winning bronze at the World Championships just a few weeks later. However, that same year, she retired from skating “for good.” She felt like skating consumed her life, that she had made it to the Olympics for her coaches and her father, and was satisfied after accomplishing that.
However, Alysa returned to the ice on her own terms at age eighteen, two years later, calling her former coaches and coming to the agreement that she would be able to make her own decisions. She started skating for herself, not the people around her. Alysa skates how she does because she is doing it for herself, choosing her own music and expressing what she wants. Commentators note the happiness and freedom she skates with–it’s because she can be herself. Unlike all of the other skaters who skated to classical music, she expressed herself with music by Laufey and Donna Summer. She skates with passion, not as a robot told what scores best, and her choice not to care about what the judges want is what helped her win.
Since her return, she has won gold at the 2025 World Championships and now, gold at the 2026 Olympics with the same routine. Without her individuality, Alysa would not be who she is today. All because of her determination to be true to herself, she was able to win.
