Four years ago, at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, Alysa Liu, a U.S. figure skater, seemed happy. She said she was happy anyway, and it was easy to believe her. She giggled when she spoke, and smiled often, revealing a row of braces. She skated a splendid long program, cleanly landing her jumps, skipping and twirling through her footwork sequences with the lightness of a small bird—a performance that commentators were quick to characterize as joyful. She learned she’d finished seventh—the highest finish of an American woman in the singles skating, and something of a surprise. There was a time when Americans were perennial contenders in women’s figure skating, one of the marquee events at the Winter Olympics. No other nation has won more medals. But no American woman had won a gold medal since 2002, and no American woman had won a medal of any color since 2006, when Liu was barely six months old.

At the start of Liu’s career, there was some hope that she’d be the one to end the long drought. She landed her first triple axel—a forward-entry jump that requires three and a half rotations, which was once a rarity in women’s figure skating but had become increasingly compulsory among the most élite—in international competition when she was twelve, the youngest American ever to do it, and at thirteen she became the youngest U.S. champion in the sport’s history. She was so small that she’d needed a hand to reach the top of the podium.

At fourteen, she was the first American woman of any age to land a quadruple jump. Quads, too, had once been rare—even among male skaters—but the Russians were turning out skater after skater who could land quads, even in combination. Liu was not known for her artistic prowess or for her ability to turn skating into an electrical conduit for an emotional connection with the crowd, but her jumping talent vaulted her into the ranks of skaters with enough technical difficulty in their programs to achieve high scores. She won a second U.S. title, too. But she grew three inches in a year, and the COVID pandemic derailed her training. She gave up practicing quads, and stopped landing a triple axel in competition. When the Beijing Olympics came around, she was the Americans’ best hope, but no one was realistically talking about medals. The Russians could have fielded two teams of skaters who could plausibly land quads and triple axels. Led by a coach, Eteri Tutberidze, who weighed her skaters by the gram and, without apology, once invited a comparison of herself to Cruella de Vil, Russia seemed to mint one prodigy after another. At the Games, only the Japanese skater Kaori Sakamoto, who made up for a lack of difficulty with excellent execution and blazing speed, was thought to stand a chance.

And that was, in some sense, the way it turned out: two Russians came away with gold and silver, while Sakamoto took the bronze. But in Beijing the Russian team imploded on live television. During the Olympics, it was reported that the favorite to win, a wisp of a girl named Kamila Valieva, had tested positive for a banned heart medication; she was allowed to continue to compete, while the investigation was ongoing, but fell apart during her long program and afterward, on television, was berated by her coach. The silver-medal winner, ​​Alexandra Trusova, who landed five quads during the free skate, was heard shouting, “I hate this sport.” The gold-medal winner, Anna Shcherbakova, sat alone, clutching a stuffed animal.

The Russians were excluded from international competition soon after, on account of the invasion of Ukraine, and in their absence Liu took bronze at the world championship that spring. Then she retired at sixteen. The grim joke among figure-skating fans was that Tutberidze’s skaters came with an expiration date: seventeen. Maybe they weren’t the only ones.

Figure skating was the only sport to include women at the first official Winter Olympics, in 1924, and it was the last to drop the designation of “ladies”: the event was called women’s figure skating for the first time in 2022. The term “ladies” reflected the sport’s traditional origins as an artistic pursuit for upper-class women instead of a merely athletic contest, but there could have been another justification: many of the sport’s most successful competitors were not fully grown women. The sport has long been dominated by teen-agers, but particularly in the past thirty years, as compulsory figures that demonstrated edgework were abandoned in competition and jumps have become more difficult. Tara Lipinski, who won Olympic gold for the U.S., in 1998, was fifteen years old, and Sarah Hughes, who won the team’s most recent gold, in 2002, was sixteen.

There were the usual obvious explanations, based on physics: small, light, narrow bodies that have not undergone puberty can spin faster and fly higher than bodies with, say, hips. That’s not to say older skaters can’t land big jumps; the only American woman at the Milan Olympics who currently performs a triple axel is Amber Glenn, who is twenty-six. But the kind of total commitment and discipline required to master many of those skills is also easier to demand of a child. “You should get ready for war before war started,” Rafael Arutyunyan, who coached Nathan Chen, the men’s gold medallist in Beijing, and taught Ilia Malinin the quad axel, told Defector, in 2022. “My problem is I am coaching women, not [junior] ladies skaters, because until they get to the point to come to me, they become women and then it's too late. The system should be created when a child comes to you from 4 or 5 years old and you give them the shortest way to get more than anybody else.”

Liu had begun skating when she was five. Her father, Arthur, had committed her life—and a great deal of money—to turning her into a champion. Her career did not have the structural stability of the Russian system—Arthur had a habit of cycling through coaches—but she was told what to eat, what to wear, what music to use, how to angle her fingers. Naturally creative and sociable, she chafed against that kind of rigidity. During COVID, she was glad when the rinks closed.

After retiring, she hung out with her friends. She hiked to the Mt. Everest base camp and went to U.C.L.A. But on a ski trip, enjoying the sense of exhilaration, she found that she missed skating. So about two years after retiring, she called her old coach and told him that she wanted to come back. He tried, and failed, to talk her out of it. This time, though, she made it clear that it would be on her terms. She would be involved in every aspect: her clothes, her choreography, her music, her training. Only after she’d assembled her team did she inform her father.

In March, 2025, at the end of her first season back, she won the world championship. The Russian skaters were still missing, but as she skated to Donna Summer’s “MacArthur Park,” fast and free, and the crowd, clapping and dancing, surged to its feet, nobody appeared to dwell on their absence.

Now she is back at the Olympics. She seems a different person than the one who skated in Beijing. Her hair is striped like a raccoon’s tail. (She adds a ring to her hair every year, she’s explained, like a tree.) In place of braces, she has a frenum piercing. She’s still a strong jumper, but she describes her goal in skating as a desire to connect with the crowd and to transmit a deep feeling. She likes the attention, she says now. She loves to perform.

During the team event’s short program, last week, she under-rotated a triple loop and finished second to Sakamoto, who comes into the singles skating as the favorite. Her reaction afterward? “Whoopsies!” Liu, along with her teammates Amber Glenn—another older skater with an unusual comeback story—and Isabeau Levito, has a real shot at a medal, and as the reigning world champion might even have a chance at gold. (She already has one from this Olympics: the U.S. won the team event.) There will be only one Russian female skater performing, competing as a neutral; her coach, Tutberidze, will be looking on. But there’s not an asterisk to this event. What Liu is doing is different from landing a handful of quads, but in its own way it advances the sport. She doesn’t project a perilous innocence, doesn’t suggest that the difference between beauty and danger rests on a blade’s edge. She skates like she’s in control, and this is where she wants to be. ♦