Team USA women’s figure skater Alysa Liu defied the odds to become the first American woman to win Olympic gold in twenty years. As the California native took to the Olympic podium before the entire world, her breathtaking comeback was also paved by her father’s patriotic story of grit and heroism against seemingly greater odds.
After ranking third in the women’s short program on Tuesday, Liu — cool, calm, and collected as usual — showed up to the rink smiling, waving to the crowd, and ready to skate. She performed her routine to Donna Summer’s “MacArthur Park Suite” with the infectious energy that is a trademark of the 20-year-old. After the near-perfect skate earned her a career-best 226.79 points, she was placed in first with just two skaters left — Japan’s three-time World Champion Kaori Sakamoto and Ami Nakai.
When both skaters just slightly missed the mark —Sakamoto scored 224.90 points and Ami five points behind her — Liu officially captured the gold medal and a much-needed win for Team USA.
ALYSA LIU'S GOLD-WINNING FREE SKATE ROUTINE! ⭐️ #WinterOlympics pic.twitter.com/mH8tZkFCdK
— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) February 20, 2026
What separates Liu from the rest of her team — and brings extra sweetness to her win — is the fact that she actually walked away from the sport for more than two years.
When Liu was thirteen, she became the youngest national champion, only to win again the following year. The teen prodigy dominated the sport, fueling hope for her family to become the next Michelle Kwan. In 2019, she even became the first American female to complete a quadruple jump in an international competition. But all that changed after the 2022 Beijing Olympics, when at age 16, Liu announced in an Instagram post that she was retiring from the sport, “… i feel so satisfied with how my skating career has gone. now that i’m finally done with my goals in skating i’m going to be moving on with my life.”
In hopes of living a “normal” life, Liu used her freedom from the ice to hang out with friends, visit Nepal, hike to Everest Base Camp, and go on road trips. That was, until a skiing trip with her family ignited an old spark — and the desire to compete again.
Liu emerged from the two-year break in 2024, punctuating her comeback with a first-place win at the World Championships the following year. It is almost unheard of to return to the sport after so much time away. But Liu proved she was just that good.
GOLD MEDALIST Alysa Liu chats with @NBCNews about winning on her own terms, skating with joy and the message she wanted to send tonight: pic.twitter.com/gVfUHzobIO
— Rohan Nadkarni (@RohanNadkarni) February 19, 2026
Liu isn’t just a talented athlete. She carries with her the precious roots of what it means to be American, and having to fight for it.
Arthur Liu, her father, was born and raised in China. He was a university student during the infamous 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, where student-led protests and demonstrations turned deadly, and hundreds, if not thousands, were arrested, killed, or went missing in the brutal government crackdown. Liu said he was “outraged” by the massacre and went on to organize more protests. After learning he was on the government’s “most wanted” list, he worried future imprisonment was inevitable. At age 25, he fled from China to Hong Kong and eventually made his way to America.
Three months before his daughter was supposed to represent the United States in the Beijing Olympics, a man who claimed to be a U.S. Official called Liu, asking for passport information. “I felt something fishy was going on,” he told the Associated Press at the time. “I’m not going to let them stop her from going and I’ll do whatever I can to make sure she’s safe and I’m willing to make sacrifices so she can enjoy the moment. I’m not going to let them win — to stop me — to silence me from expressing my opinions anywhere.”
Prosecutors alleged that the family was a target of a Chinese spying operation, and that the man was hired to perform surveillance on them.
But foreign harassment didn’t stop the teenager, and Liu still made her Olympic debut that year — just with heightened security from the State Department.
True to her light-hearted nature, Liu called the experience “a little bit freaky and exciting,” and wondered what her life would look like as a movie. “They got to make me look like a super cool hero or something. I can’t just be the kid that got spied on and did nothing about it.”
“I would just have the main focus be my dad’s story, because his story is so cool … everything that only happened because of what he did, so, I feel like we got to start with the roots.”
