U.S. Medal Hopes Now Rest on Alysa Liu, But the Figure Skater Isn’t Feeling the Pressure

The 20-year-old heads into the free skate in third after medal favorite Amber Glenn missed a combination in her short program.

Alysa Liu, who is third heading into the free skate, is doing her best to be present at the Milan Cortina Olympics rather than feeling pressure to win a medal. | Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated

MILAN — Amber Glenn bailed and Alysa Liu gasped. Liu could talk for hours about Glenn—Liu could talk for hours about anything—but at that moment, in the media mixed zone at Milano MSK Competition rink, a gasp was worth a thousand words. Liu was watching her teammate on TV. Glenn was supposed to do a triple loop and didn’t. Invalid element. Farewell, gold medal dreams.

Figure skating is elegant and powerful, beautiful and precise, but mostly, on the Olympic level, it is tense. There is nothing quite like it in sports. The difference between extraordinary success and crushing disappointment is literally as thin as the blade of a skate—and when a program suddenly collapses, as Glenn’s did, skaters have zero seconds to shake it off. They must keep going.

“She’s gone through so much, and, like, she works so freaking hard,” Liu said. “She’s overcome a lot, and I just want her to be happy.”

Happy will have to wait. Glenn, who entered the competition as a medal favorite, finished 13th in the short program. She can make up some ground in Thursday’s free skate, but realistically, the medal math just doesn’t work. In 2018, Nathan Chen finished 17th in the short program, and then posted the top score in the free skate to vault all the way to fifth, but that was an aberrational performance. Chen did an unprecedented six quadruple jumps that night. 

Though Amber Glenn nailed a triple Axel on her first combination, a missed triple loop later in her program cost her roughly seven points. | Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated

Glenn was clearly and understandably devastated. She declined to talk to reporters afterward. Like Ilia Malinin, she will have time to figure out why this happened. The easy answer is that Olympic pressure got to Glenn, as it did to Malinin. But that is not necessarily the correct answer.

American medal hopes now rest in Liu’s hands—for at least another 30 seconds, until Liu tosses them over her shoulder and laughs.

“A medal?” Liu said, after placing third in the short program.

She gasped again—mockingly, this time.

“I don’t need a medal. I just need to be here. I just need to be present.”

Liu retired, came back, and now leans so heavily into joy that she says she barely pays attention to her score. (“It doesn’t change how I did,” she says.)  On Tuesday, she was too busy looking at her four siblings—while she was skating. She is the oldest of five, and she said she “literally can’t remember” the last time they saw her skate in competition. During her first go-round, they were so young and she was so busy: “I didn’t see my siblings very much the last time I was a skater,” she said. Now they have school. They skipped it to come here.

“I perform to the people,” Liu said. “This is different from the usual arenas that we compete in, because everyone is so high—like, the first row is not right there. I don’t know how I feel about that.”

Liu is a natural entertainer, and she spoke Tuesday like she has an entertainer’s priorities: “I do have a new dress for the free skate. So I’m really excited for that. And, yeah, I don’t know. I just really want to be invited to the Olympic Gala [at the end of the Olympics]. So I’m just putting that out there.”

Japan’s Ami Nakai and Kaori Sakamoto are 1–2 in the scoring entering the free skate, but the gap between Nakai and 10th-place Niina Petrokina is only 9.08 points. (Nakai, 17, secured her spot after nailing a triple Axel, which Glenn also did before missing her triple loop combination later in her routine.) There is an opening for a relative unknown to skate the performance of her life and win gold.

Liu scored a 76.59 points in the short program, putting her a little more than two points back from leader Ami Nakai. | Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated

There is also an opening for Liu to win the gold medal she adamantly does not covet.

“My family and my friends, they feed into what I do, and they’re the only reason why I’m here,” she said.  “I want to keep growing, and I just want to keep experiencing new things.”

That sounds like a great way to handle pressure, and Liu’s third-place score supports that argument. But just because it is right for Liu does not mean it would be right for anybody else. All we can really say about Glenn is that she went after this with everything she had, and it wasn’t her night. Liu promised she would talk to her friend when she left the rink. 

“She’s super strong,” Liu said. “She can handle it.”

The free skate awaits, and so Glenn will keep going. It’s what the sport demands.

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