When Team USA figure skater Alysa Liu came out of retirement in 2024 to prepare for the 2026 Winter Olympics, the decision was hers alone, just as it was when she retired two years earlier.
Alysa, 20, recalled her father, Arthur Liu, being mad at her choice to step back from the sport and she took that with her in her return to the ice.
“I didn’t want him to be mad that I was coming back,” Alysa told Rolling Stone in a video interview posted on Saturday, March 7. “I just didn’t want him to care, like, at all. It shouldn’t affect him as much as it did the last time.”
Alysa has been open in the past about the intense training she underwent as a teenage figure skating prodigy, which caused her to burn out and took away from her enjoyment of the sport.
“I mean, he was happy but that didn’t matter to me,” Alysa continued. “I didn’t care that he was happy. I was almost mad that he was happy ‘cause I was like, ‘How dare you? You don’t deserve to be happy over this decision because you were mad when I quit.'”
She explained, “He shouldn’t have an opinion on it at all, if that makes sense. I didn’t want him to be mad that I was coming back. I just didn’t want him to care, like, at all. It shouldn’t affect him as much as it did the last time.”
At the 2026 Winter Olympics, Alysa became the first American woman to medal in figure skating at the Olympics since 2006 and the first to win gold since 2002.
It’s a far cry from where she was before her retirement — memories she says she has since blocked out.
“It was so bad. I just didn’t want to remember,” she said. “Every day was the same for me. Practice was so serious. I would cry after falling on every jump. The team I had around me was so strict. So I was in fight-or-flight mode all the time.”
Alysa added that she did not get a day off until the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020.
“I was so tired until I got that day off,” she said. “You’re supposed to take recovery days. But my team was kind of ignorant to all of this.”
She added, “I’d never made a single decision. I was just agreeing to what everyone else around me was saying.”
This time around, Alysa did things her way, though she clarified that she didn’t “fire” her dad when she returned to the sport.
“I didn’t have to fire him,” she said. “He was never there. He was not on the team, so it was fine.”
