Olympic skater Alysa Liu says leaving competition ‘the best decision I ever made’

Liu’s is the type of personal choice that we’re not accustomed to seeing.

The typical story line is that the ingenue becomes internationally competitive, makes an Olympics (or Grand Slam or whatever the top competition is), participates, sticks around, gets older, maybe doesn’t know when to leave. The forces invested in the athlete — parents, coaches, sponsors, federations, peers — make an individual decision to give up the expensive, all-consuming sport seem almost impossible.

But young athletes are taking more control over their lives. Australian tennis player Ash Barty retired at 25, shortly after winning her third Grand Slam in January.

And now Liu, at 16.

She has been skating since she was 5 and wants her own life. She wants to hang out with her four younger siblings, live at her house in Richmond, apply to college, spend time with friends, get her driver’s license, play the piano, cuddle with her cat Xiao Bao.

All things she couldn’t do while she pursued an Olympic-level skating career.

“I have no regrets,” she said. “I’m sure it would be the opposite, if I stayed in skating. I’d have regrets.”

Like so many Olympians, Liu had a particularly tough stretch leading up to the Beijing Olympics. She trained in Oakland but had limited ice time at the height of the pandemic, having to go in and out of the building with her skates already on, skating alone and doing warm-ups and other training in a public park.

During the pandemic
,
she left her longtime coach and then made yet another coaching change months before Beijing. She was dealing with a changing, maturing body. She lived in Europe and then Colorado Springs and was isolated from her father and siblings. She ended up testing positive for the coronavirus while at the Olympic trials in Nashville and couldn’t compete, but petitioned and was selected for the Olympic team. Prior to leaving for Beijing, she called the process “overwhelming.”

But, she says, none of those factors caused her retirement.

“No, it would have gone the same way,” she said. “If I didn’t make the Olympic team, I might have done another four years. That’s the only thing that might have changed my decision. There are just so many other things I want to do.”

Liu’s only Olympics was strange. She was in tightly restricted Beijing. Her competition was overshadowed by the positive drug test by Russian skater Kamila Valieva. Liu was unable to explore her father’s homeland, or visit relatives, or fully experience China beyond peering out the window of the bus to and from her venue.

After the Olympics, it came out that Alysa and her father, Arthur Liu, had been targeted in a spying campaign. The U.S. Justice Department announced charges against a group of men accused of acting on behalf of the Chinese government, stalking and harassing Chinese dissidents.

Arthur Liu later told the Associated Press he was one of the targeted but said that he didn’t share that information with his daughter until after the Olympics. Arthur Liu had protested the Chinese government after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, then
emigrated
from China and is now an Oakland-based immigration lawyer.

Alysa Liu declined to comment on the situation. On her Instagram she posted, “hi everyone!! the case regarding my family being spied on by the chinese government is beyond sport. if you don’t know about the politics and history of china, please refrain from commenting about it. i am proud of what my dad did for his people in 1989.”

Following the Olympics, in which she finished seventh, Liu skated in the world championships in France, where she won a bronze medal. That competition, too, was strange; the favored Russians were banned in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Despite all the oddness and tension, Liu looks back fondly on her lone Olympics. After all, she has no other experience to which to compare it.