Winter Olympics 2026: Alysa Liu, gold-medal winner, is the happiest Olympian alive

MILAN — As she skated around the Assago Ice Skating Arena rink, moments before the most important routine of her life, Alysa Liu caught sight of her teammate Amber Glenn near the kiss-and-cry couch. Glenn, devastated after Tuesday night’s program, had skated a spectacular routine of her own nearly two hours before .

As Liu drew close, she gave Glenn a congratulatory thumbs-up.  “What are you doing?” an exasperated Glenn replied. “Go skate!”  So Alysa Liu did.

And she won herself a gold medal , smiling all the way.  There are no record books to measure such things, but it’s entirely possible that no Olympian has ever smiled as much as Liu did on Thursday night, executing a brilliant, virtually flawless free skate that vaulted her from third place into first.

She smiled when she stepped onto the ice, she smiled when she spotted Glenn, she smiled through her lutzes and loops and salchows, she smiled when she pointed her left finger to the sky to close out her routine.

And she smiled — and giggled a triumphant laugh — when she skated right up to the rinkside camera and bellowed, “That’s what I’m f***ing talking about!”  That is the entire joy of the Alysa Liu experience — giddiness, confidence, joy, serenity — and gold-medal-winning talent.

At an Olympics where so many others have crumbled under the pressure, she literally laughed in pressure’s face.  “She’s not like us,” her coach Phillip DiGuglielmo said, beaming in the afterglow of her victory. “The rest of us here would be like, ‘Oh my God, I’m nervous. I can’t do this.

I have a million voices in my head.’ She has one voice in her head and it says, ‘I got this.’” “The feelings I felt out there were calm, happy, confident,” she said after coming off the ice, drawing out pauses between each word. “Of course I had fun. But I’ve been having fun all the time.”  Alysa Liu won a second gold medal Thursday at the Milan Cortina Olympics and celebrated like only she can.

REUTERS / REUTERS Her story remains a remarkable one: a champion at the intermediate, junior and national levels from 2016 to 2020, she made the 2022 Olympic team … and then decided she was done with skating. Completely, thoroughly, slam-the-door done.

She enrolled in classes at UCLA, she spent time with friends, she traveled the world … all the parts of a normal life denied to competitive figure skaters.  Somewhere along the line, though, she decided to come back to skating, decided that this was the way she could best express her abundance of ideas, in fields far from the ice.

Get her started talking about music or fashion or choreography, and she’s likely to spiral off in giddy delight about her latest inspiration or creation. “I think I have a beautiful life story, and I feel really lucky,” Liu said. “I’m glad that a lot of people are now watching me so I can show them everything I’ve come up with in my brain.”  Liu rediscovered a love of skating, and skating loved her back.