The Alysa Liu Effect
She proves that an Olympic gold-medalist figure skater can be strong, warm to her competitors, and salty all at the same time.
Begin with the hair—which, after all, Alysa Liu invites us to do. It’s hardly the halo of an ice angel. Her dyed-blond-and-black circlets have a welcome element of scornfulness, a taunting of judgment. The hair says: Figure skating submits young women to continual verdict, assaults their self-esteem over a toe point or pound of weight, but here is someone who will not comply, who has found her own ebullient, levitating, and self-approving form.
Liu takes all the tears in the kiss-and-cry zone—where so many skaters have suffered fierce whispers from unforgiving coaches and devastating appraisals in the form of “judges’ marks”—and dries them. She repudiates an austere, traditional training system that breaks tiny dancers into pieces. At the Milan Cortina games she skated on her own terms to seize America’s first Olympic gold medal in women’s figure skating since 2002—and became a new kind of icon, one who eats and wears whatever the hell she wants. “I don’t know how I’m going to deal with it,” she said of the increased attention that was coming her way after her euphoric, spinning, mirror-ball free skate to Donna Summer’s version of “MacArthur Park” on Thursday. “Probably wigs. I’m gonna wear some wigs when I go outside.”
Her performance proved that a 20-year-old woman can be strong, feathering, free, warm to her competitors, and salty all at the same time. Cloaked in a dress that looked like it was made of gold coins, and that seemed to give her a jauntiness on the ice, Liu completed a strenuous seven triple jumps. Her effort was all the more extraordinary given that she had retired in 2022 at the age of 16 because she didn’t want to become a sulky, overtrained arthritic with the emotional disposition of burnt toast. “The last time I was skating it was so rough,” she said in a press conference after her gold-medal win, “I genuinely cannot even begin to start on it.”
