😍 The Infectious Joy of Alysa Liu

How Team USA's youngest competitor reminded us of the dream in "Olympic dream"

Somewhere, Alysa Liu is smiling.

Last week, that where was Olympic ice, if you could believe it. The smile on Liu’s face when she skated to center ice for the first time suggested she was closer to a friend’s birthday party, at her hometown ice rink in the Bay Area, than Capital Indoor Stadium in Beijing and the Winter Olympic Games.

Perhaps these stages are simply interchangeable for this 16-year-old who looked like she had the most fun at these Olympics and said so. From her first step onto the ice to her last, she carried along the brightest of smiles, affixed with a full set of gorgeous teenage braces—a smile not of a performer putting on a face for the judges, but one of a person, as genuinely as it is possible, having the time of their life.

Whatever was to come, nothing could take these moments away from her.

It’s nothing new to say that these Olympics were doomed from the beginning. Given the challenges brought by the pandemic, the coverage of the Games was less immersive and more impersonal than I can remember.

But its cooperative pageantry was shrouded in controversy and negativity. The Olympics entered Beijing with a hundred pounds of political pretense and exited with athletes calling into question the qualifications of its judges and, therefore, the validity of its results. Sandwiched in the middle, NBC lingered on failure—the minor slips, on an icy mountain, that kept one of Team USA’s biggest international superstars from bringing home any medals.

Of course, the biggest controversy of all enveloped Liu’s very sport.

There just wasn’t a lot of good news coming out of Beijing, nor did it seem like much of an effort was made to find some—unless an athlete was winning.

Liu wasn’t going to win. She probably wasn’t even medaling—neither were her Women’s Singles teammates, Karen Chen and Mariah Bell—because she didn’t have the right math. Like gymnastics, the technical arrangement of a figure skating program gives certain athletes massive advantages over the competition because of the skills they’re capable of including. Simone Biles, at least in part, can win so many titles because she’s attempting more challenging stunts, which starts her off with a higher overall score than her competitors before she even begins a routine.

Artistry matters a little in figure skating. It is, according to Johnny Weir, what separated the Women’s Singles gold medalist from the silver medalist, both of Russia, despite that silver medalist having a slightly more challenging technical program. But it’s not enough to make a difference for Americans, as of late.

Quadruple jumps are the most challenging skills a skater can put into a women’s program. All of the Russians can do them; basically no one else.

Two-and-a-half years ago, Liu became the first American woman to land a quad in competition, and she’s still the only one to have done it. She was American figure skating’s great hope at age 14, having just won back-to-back national titles and nearly a third thereafter, because if you can land a quad, you can compete with the Russians. (Not to mention she could stick a triple axel with the best of ‘em.)

And if you’re competing with the Russians, you’re a real Olympic contender.

Alysa is the oldest of five siblings, all born from a surrogate mother to their Chinese-born father, Arthur Liu, in the Bay Area.

At the time of her history-making quadruple jump, she was the reigning U.S. champion and, at 13, its youngest ever. Soon after, she defended her title and pursued a never before seen three-peat, only to narrowly miss the mark by a few points much to Weir’s surprise. Since then, her straight path to Beijing has seen some curves.

Liu arrived at last month’s U.S. Championships in Nashville with a new coach and without quadruple jumps in her repertoire. “It was a lot easier when I was smaller, and a lot shorter,” she told NBC Sports, having grown three inches in a year. Then, between the short and free skate programs, she learned she had tested positive for COVID-19 and disqualified herself from the competition—the last before the Olympic team was to be determined. Petitioning for her place despite the non-result, she made the team to no objections and has been making the most of it.

Between events in Beijing, she engaged in multiple snowball fights, built snow forts with Team Korea, chased Olympic mascot Bing Dwen Dwen for pictures, and cosplayed with Korean skater Young You, to name just a few activities.

“Personally, I thought with COVID and everything, I would just be in my room, but that’s not the case,” she said. “I’m really glad (to be here). And there’s a mall. I didn’t know that. So, I’m really just having fun.”

She’s enjoying these Games in a way only the youngest member of Team USA can, by being authentically herself—and that, in itself, feels refreshingly new.

So many of her fellow U.S. competitors, especially those the media has decided to focus on, are arriving in Beijing looking at either another international stop in the midst of their World Cup season or a return to a noticeably less fun Olympics.

Certainly, given the health and safety protocols in place, these Games were setup to be more isolating than any that’ve come before them. And given her descending recent luck and stunted ascent, Liu could’ve gone into the negative space these Games often weighed into without anyone to blame her.

Instead, she decided to live for the moment.

“My skating now, I feel like I have more purpose to it,” she told Defector last month. “It’s more meaningful to me than when I was 13. When I was 13, I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, jump, jump! Woo!’ But, like, now there is an actual meaning to skating, and now I have a reason to do it. A lot of it is honoring little Alysa’s dream. That I kind of didn’t think about before.”

The way that attitude came out through her smile and extended to her skating last week was beautiful. It brought our Olympic love affair back to the surface when no one was looking for it, by reminding us of the dream in “Olympic dream”—one, removed from the pressure of winning, of being an Olympian.

Surely there were others. But this was Alysa’s dream. Realized.