Alysa Liu

Alysa Liu was born on 8 August 2005 in Clovis, California, and raised in the East Bay. She was skating by five and rewriting the junior record book by her early teens — youngest U.S. champion at 13 in 2019, a second national title a year later, and later the first American woman to land a quad Lutz in competition. Her father, Arthur Liu, is a Chinese American immigration attorney who came to the United States as a political refugee after the 1989 Tiananmen protests.

Beijing 2022 brought an Olympic debut (seventh in women’s singles) and, weeks later, World bronze in Montpellier. Then she walked away at 16. She enrolled at UCLA, lost track of where her skates were, and spent two seasons living like a student instead of a prodigy. When she returned in 2024 under coaches Phillip DiGuglielmo and Massimo Scali, she set her own schedule and programs — less job, more craft she had chosen again.

That return produced the 2025 World title in Boston. Skating last to Donna Summer’s “MacArthur Park,” she cleaned seven triples and ended a 19-year U.S. drought in women’s singles. Milano Cortina finished the arc: team gold with the United States, then a climb from third after the short program to women’s singles gold — the first American woman to win the event since Sarah Hughes in 2002. One Games, two Olympic golds.

The middle chapter is what makes her hard to copy. Liu left the sport, rebuilt a life away from it, and still ended two long American droughts — Worlds first, then Olympic singles. Nobody knows yet whether she wants a long senior reign after Milano, or whether this second peak was always meant to be brief. Either way, the comeback already changed what a U.S. women’s skating career can look like.