As Alysa Liu nearly collapsed off the ice, in the seconds between completing the free skate of her life and finding out that it had made her world champion, amid her gasps of “What the hell?” and choreographer Massimo Scala’s yelps of “You did it!”, coach Phillip DiGuglielmo leaned in for a quiet question.
He did not ask Liu, 19, about the exhilarating triple lutz–double axel–double toe loop she hit in the second half of Friday’s program at Boston’s TD Garden that elicited a roar from the crowd and helped earn her a career-best 148.39 to vault her ahead of Kaori Sakamoto and Mone Chiba, both of Japan. He did not ask what it would mean to her to become the first U.S. woman to win the figure skating world championships since 2006, when she was eight months old. He did not ask about her extraordinary comeback story.
He asked, “Did you have fun?”
For so long, Liu’s answer would have been no. She was so good, so young that her career seemed to race along whether she wanted it to or not—and she did not want it to. At 13, and still too young to compete internationally, she became the youngest woman to win U.S. nationals. (She was 4’7” and needed help to reach the top step of the podium.) At 14, she became the first American woman to land a quadruple jump in competition and the ninth woman to land a triple axel, and the first to do both in one program. (“It’s pretty cool,” she said afterward. “I don’t obsess.”) A few months later, she became the youngest two-time U.S. champion ever; she had grown only three inches and still could not climb to the top of the podium on her own. At 16, she was the youngest athlete named to the U.S. Olympic team for Beijing.
She enjoyed almost none of it, she says now.
“I really don’t think I wanted to do any competition before,” she said on Wednesday. “Besides not wanting to do it, I definitely wasn’t ready for competitions ever, in my opinion,” she added.
She finished seventh at the Olympics and won bronze the next month at the world championships. Then, she retired.
She finished high school and began studying psychology at UCLA. She tried basketball, tennis and volleyball. She explored Los Angeles and experimented with fashion and photography. The only ice she touched was in her drinks. Then, in early 2024, she went skiing. The adrenaline rush reminded her of skating. She wondered if she could ever enjoy the sport again. At some point in the intervening two years, she realized she had misplaced her skates, but once she found them, she found that her talent was still there. She landed a double axel and a triple salchow during her first practice.
She called DiGuglielmo, her longtime coach, to tell him she wanted to stage a comeback, with the 2026 Milan Olympics as her goal. “Why?” he asked. “Why would you do this to yourself?” He listed the people who had tried and failed.
She listed the reasons she was different. He poured himself a large glass of California red. Two hours later, after he had finished the rest of the bottle, he agreed to help her.
Thirty-one months after her last competitive routine, she returned to the ice in October 2024 for the CS Budapest Trophy—and won it. “Maybe I’m not going to go to school this quarter,” she said to DiGuglielmo. She finished second at U.S. nationals this year to Amber Glenn. What had once seemed a long shot now seemed like a plan.
“The new plan,” said DiGuglielmo on Friday, “is having an athlete who has a life—and then skates.”
Indeed, the lesson Liu has taken from her success is not that she should have stuck with figure skating. It’s that she needed the time off.
“Moments like these make me realize 16-year-old me was so right,” she said. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t decide to retire for a little bit. So I’m glad that I listened to myself.”
So on Friday, while everyone else in the arena—including Sakamoto, who gave her a standing ovation—celebrated Liu’s performance, Liu grinned at DiGuglielmo. “Yeah,” she said. She had fun.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Alysa Liu Fell in Love With Skating All Over Again—And Is Now a World Champion.