How Alysa Liu rediscovered figure skating and came out of retirement

/
How Alysa Liu rediscovered figure skating and came out of retirement

How did Alysa Liu get to this point, to where she is skating in this weekend’s Budapest Trophy in Hungary, her first real competition in two and a half years?

How and why did she return to the spotlight after purposefully retreating to the shadows, her break from being ALYSA LIU (drum roll) so complete that she also broke from social media, then began posting photos in which alysa liu (whisper) often turned her face from the camera or made it indistinct.

At age 13, Liu had stood the figure skating world on its head. At 16, soon after skating at the 2022 Winter Olympics and winning a bronze medal at the 2022 World Championships, Liu retired from the sport.

She did some post-Olympic shows and did not skate at all for nearly a year and a half. At 19, a sophomore at UCLA, she is competing again.

Talk about things turning upside down.

Read More

Chock and Bates talk past, present future. Will it include 2026 Olympics?

/
Chock and Bates talk past, present future. Will it include 2026 Olympics?

Theirs is a career noteworthy for its longevity and its achievements.

Ice dancers Madison Chock, 31, and her soon-to-be husband, Evan Bates, 35, have filled their résumé with just about every medal possible during a skating partnership that began 13 seasons ago.

Chock and Bates are the defending champions going into this week’s World Figure Skating Championships in Montreal, where another medal of any color would be their fifth, making them the most decorated U.S. ice dance team ever at the world meet.

They have won an Olympic team event medal, now a gold from the 2022 Winter Games as a result of the doping disqualification of Russia’s Kamila Valieva - although when they will receive it still remains anyone’s guess given the latest appeals in a case that already has dragged on for more than two years.

Read More

Chen's autobiography provides a rare revelatory look at the man who won Olympic skating gold a year ago

/
Chen's autobiography provides a rare revelatory look at the man who won Olympic skating gold a year ago

The idea of covering figure skating is something of a contradiction in terms.

Oxymoronic, if you will, like covering all individual sports, in which athletes compete infrequently, train all over the world, and the media rarely sees them in practice.  A far cry from my experiences covering pro football, baseball and hockey, when I saw the athletes nearly every day. The latter is what a journalist thinks of as covering a sport.

I wrote about Nathan Chen’s figure skating career for seven years, beginning with the 2016 U.S. Championships, which would be one of his many history-making performances.

I saw him only at competitions, when the chances to have insightful conversations are minimal.

Even though Chen was gracious enough to do several one-on-one telephone interviews with me, they were generally brief – even if he always spoke so fast you could get 20-minutes-worth of answers in a 15-minute call.

So I never had any misconceptions about really knowing Chen or his family or what he (and they) went through in the nearly 20 years between his putting on skates for the first time and his winning the men’s singles gold medal at the Olympics exactly one year ago.

Sure, there snippets of “revelations,” one coming soon after Chen’s Olympic triumph when his coach, Rafael Arutunian, mentioned giving Chen back money his mother had paid for lessons because he knew how pressed they were for funds.  And, in doing a story about his years taking ballet, I learned from his teachers what a quick study and gifted dancer he was.

But how little I or anyone outside the shy Chen’s inner circle knew about him became apparent in reading his recently published autobiography, “One Jump at a Time,” written with Time magazine’s Alice Park.

Read More

Jason Brown returns to figure skating, and a Toronto basement, with an ‘Impossible Dream’

/
Jason Brown returns to figure skating, and a Toronto basement, with an ‘Impossible Dream’

In June, figure skater Jason Brown moved all his belongings out of the Toronto basement apartment where he had lived most of the last four years while training to make the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. He brought everything back to his family home north of Chicago, where nearly all those possessions – and his car – remain.

“No part of me thought I was coming back to Toronto,” Brown told me in a recent phone conversation.

Why would he have? Brown, 28 next month, had been in Toronto to work with coaches Tracy Wilson and Brian Orser on preparing for competitions. That lengthy phase of his skating career, with 12 years as a senior competitor and suitcases full of medals and achievements, seemed to be over with his solid sixth-place finish in the men’s singles event in China.

Brown had wearied of the blinkered perspective and single-minded focus necessary to be an elite competitive skater. He wanted to immerse himself more deeply in the other sides of skating, using his nonpareil artistry and body awareness to be a choreographer, to be a frequent and innovative show skater, to lay groundwork for the hope of one day producing his own show and having a skating camp.

None of those endeavors needed him to be based in Toronto.

And yet there he was in Toronto when we talked, back in the basement apartment with one suitcase of belongings, back training at the Cricket Club for his next competition, the U.S. Championships in late January, back with a frame of mind in which skating at the 2026 Winter Games is a far-off but not far-fetched thought.

Read More

In return to Yale, Nathan Chen goes back to his future

/
In return to Yale, Nathan Chen goes back to his future

When Nathan Chen returns to Yale late this summer after a two-year leave of absence, his housing arrangement will make Chen think he is going back to the future.

“I feel like I’m a returning first-year,” said Chen, actually a rising junior.

He has a room on Yale’s Old Campus, where the residence halls are primarily occupied by first-year students. It is where he lived the first time around after matriculating in the 2018-19 academic year.

The difference this time is Chen also wants to feel present on campus in a way he could not during his first two years of college, when he jammed studies and an international figure skating career into days that seemed too short.

Read More