After completing her short programme at the 2026 Milan Winter Olympics, Alysa Liu was asked the inevitable question: how does she handle the pressure? “I really don’t feel nervous. I don’t feel the pressure. There’s nothing holding me down or holding me back,” she said. She then went on to win gold.
Liu had just ended a 24-year drought for American women’s figure skating, skating a career-best free skate to Donna Summer’s “MacArthur Park” in front of a roaring Milan crowd, scoring 150.20 in the free skate, the highest mark for a women’s free skate all season in international competition, for a combined total of 226.79. Yet the result, by her own account, was almost incidental. Winning never seemed to matter. With the gold medal hanging around her neck, Liu stopped short of saying if she even wanted it.
What makes Liu culturally significant is not simply what she achieved in Milan, but how she achieved it. Elite sport is built on the architecture of pressure, the idea that wanting it badly enough is what separates champions from also-rans. Liu doesn’t just challenge that assumption. She dismantles it entirely. So unbothered was she that Liu spent part of her six-minute warmup cheering on teammate Amber Glenn in the leader’s chair, and snapped a selfie with her coaches minutes before taking the ice.
Her path to gold was anything but linear. At Beijing 2022, she had achieved a dream, skating at the Olympics at just 16, but wore a hollow smile on the ice. As she later reflected: “It’s not that I didn’t want to be seen. It’s just I had nothing to show.” She retired shortly after, burned out. Her two-year hiatus included climbing Everest Base Camp, getting her driver’s licence, and enrolling in a psychology degree at UCLA. She returned to skating in 2024 as a fundamentally different competitor.
Those who know her best saw the transformation clearly. “She’s not like us,” her coach, Phillip DiGuglielmo, said. “The rest of us here would be like, ‘Oh my God, I’m nervous. Oh, I can’t do this.'” NBC analyst and two-time Olympian Johnny Weir offered perhaps the broader perspective: “When you are an Olympic athlete that has a chance in front of the world every four years, it literally is your life’s work that’s on the line. And she has found a way to compartmentalise that and put it down… I just think it’s so wonderfully healthy and brave and strong.”
“Alysa Liu core” has since emerged on social media as shorthand for an unbothered, self-directed aesthetic, the halo hair, the low-key energy, the sense that her style reads as personal rather than packaged. In an era defined by burnout and the relentless pursuit of ambition, she offers something genuinely radical: the idea that doing something purely for the love of it might just be enough.
As it turns out, it was more than enough. It was gold.
By Hannah Kate Costello, Coeditor