How Alysa Liu rediscovered figure skating and came out of retirement

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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.

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Bold Isabeau Levito faces skating idol at Grand Prix Final

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Bold Isabeau Levito faces skating idol at Grand Prix Final

The highlight of Isabeau Levito’s season so far came at Skate America in October.

It wasn’t the silver medal Levito won there, in her debut on figure skating’s senior Grand Prix circuit.

It was meeting the reigning world champion – and 2022 Skate America winner – Kaori Sakamoto of Japan.

“She is one of my idols,” Levito said of Sakamoto, who is also the 2022 Olympic bronze medalist.  “Right before her long program at worlds, you could see she was determined and strong and fierce.  Her eyes would obliterate you.

“That look and that fierceness and determination. . .I admire it so much, and I hope to have it someday.”

At only 15, Levito already belies her delicacy of movement on the ice with such powerful determination to reach her aspirations that she gets to meet Sakamoto again this week at the Grand Prix Final in Torino, Italy, where the senior women’s event begins Friday.

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Figure skating champion Bradie Tennell, a competitive ‘shark,’ making comeback in new waters

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Figure skating champion Bradie Tennell, a competitive ‘shark,’ making comeback in new waters

A week after chronic foot pain forced Bradie Tennell to withdraw from the 2022 U.S. Figure Skating Championships, the impact of that situation hit her full force.

Tennell was the defending national champion, a good bet to make the 2022 Olympic team had she been healthy. But she was lying in bed in her family home in the Chicago suburbs as nationals was going on in Nashville.

She had lost the chance to realize her dream of skating in another Olympic Games. She had lost an entire competitive season. Then she realized a fundamental part of her also had been lost when walking to the kitchen became so painful it was easier to stay hungry until someone could bring her food.

“In my core, I’m an athlete,” Tennell said via telephone in an interview last week. “I take so much pride in being able to demand pretty much anything of my body and being able to do it. If I want to go on a 10-mile hike, I can go on a 10-mile hike. This was like my identity as an athlete being so suddenly ripped away.”

This lengthy phone and text interview was the first time the two-time U.S. champion and 2018 Olympian had spoken at length about what she described as an “honestly traumatic experience.”

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Still just 16, Alysa Liu has met the challenges of going from insouciant prodigy to world medalist

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Still just 16, Alysa Liu has met the challenges of going from insouciant prodigy to world medalist

You look at Alysa Liu, and you see a 16-year-old with braces, and it doesn’t seem possible she still is that young because of how much has happened to her in the past four years, all of it in the public eye.

Liu has gone through adolescence under the relentless glare of a spotlight she attracted in January 2019, at age 13, by becoming the youngest U.S. women’s singles champion ever. She was a prodigy who would bear huge expectations for two seasons before she was even eligible to compete at the senior level in her sport.

It all was so easy at the start, with one landmark achievement after another, a second U.S. title in 2020, victories on the Junior Grand Prix circuit, history-making triple axel and quadruple jumps.

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With personal best in worlds short, Mariah Bell aging like a fine wine

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With personal best in worlds short, Mariah Bell aging like a fine wine

In women’s singles skating, where youth has been served over the last 30 years, it is easy to think of a 25-year-old as a woman of a certain age.

So it was a big talking point in January when, at 25, Mariah Bell became the oldest U.S. women’s champion in 95 years and again in February when she became the oldest U.S. woman to compete in Olympic singles in 94 years, finishing 10th.

Now here we are in late March, less than a month before Bell’s 26 birthday, and she is doing the fine wine thing, getting better as time passes.

Call it aging gracefully, which describes Bell’s fluid, elegant skating in Wednesday’s short program at the World Figure Skating Championships in Montpellier, France.

In opening the final competition of a long season – perhaps the final competition of her lengthy career? – Bell had her highest short program score ever and her highest finish ever, third place, in any program at a global championship.

“I absolutely think I’m getting better,” Bell said. “As long as you want to and are dedicated, you can continue to improve.”

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