WICHITA, Kansas – When Alysa Liu called her former coach, Phillip DiGuglielmo, about a year ago to say that she wanted to return to competitive skating, he tried to talk her out of it.
He tried so hard that one glass of wine led to another, until DiGuglielmo had put down a whole bottle in a vain two-hour effort to convince her by enumerating all the reasons why coming back would be tortuous, maybe even torturous — and certainly a bad idea.
What he didn’t know then was how much Liu had changed in the time since she had announced her retirement at the end of the 2022 season, when she was plainly sick of skating.
“I wouldn’t ask any elite athlete to take two years off of skating,” DiGuglielmo said Thursday night, after Liu won the short program at the Prevagen U.S. Figure Skating Championships, “but maybe that was what made her this good, because she had time to mature.
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“She had time to be out of skating. She had time to figure out who she is. All her body language is so different. She isn’t just a kid who grew up. She’s now this sophisticated young woman.”
That new version of Liu was plain in her 2 minutes, 50 seconds of sensitive skating to the Laufey song, “Promise,” which tells a love story similar to that of her relationship with the sport. There is a breakup with the promise of no future contact, until the realization that the love still is there.
It is not music that can carry a skater. The athlete has to infuse the performance with a subtle passion, refusing to give in to overwrought movement or expression, and Liu carried that off before a crowd that rewarded her with a standing ovation.
The judges rewarded her with 76.36 points. That is more than Liu had scored for the short in 2019, when she became, at 13, the youngest U.S women’s champion, or in 2020, when she became the youngest to win consecutive titles. In neither of those years had she won the short program.
She goes into Friday night’s free skate (8 ET, NBC and Peacock) more than five points ahead of both two-time winner Bradie Tennell (71.23) and defending champion Amber Glenn (70.91). Sarah Everhardt (70.72) is fourth.
Liu could not recall what it felt like to win six years ago. When you are 19, six years can seem like forever.
“Honestly, it feels like a different lifetime,” she said. “When I see, like, old videos of me, I’m just, ‘That’s wasn’t me.’ It was obviously, but it was just so long ago I don’t remember.”
That Alysa Liu was a jumper extraordinaire, who made U.S. Championships history with her triple Axels and also was the first U.S. woman to land a quadruple jump. Injuries stole her ability to do those jumps and took with them a piece of her previous identity as a phenom.
This Alysa Liu is a performer who can call on some life experience to express character. She trekked with friends to Mount Everest base camp. She enrolled at UCLA, finishing her first year before the renewed demands of skating and travel led her to defer this year’s fall quarter midway through it. She is also deferring the winter quarter.
The extra time available to train without schoolwork began to produce results in early January.
“In some ways, like jumps, it was easier than I expected in coming back,” she said. “In some ways, it was much harder. I only felt comfortable with my free skate run-throughs about a week and a half ago.”
She had done four full-fledged competitions prior to nationals, with mixed results. Her flawless short program Thursday was by far her best skate of the season – and, overall, one of the best of a career that also includes a 2022 World Championships bronze medal and a sixth-place finish at the 2022 Olympics.
Liu was so caught up in this moment she didn’t realize she had cut her hand while grabbing her skate in a spin. It left blood spots on the front of her cream-and-grey dress.
When she finished, Liu gave in to the tears she worried might fall during the performance, so deep were the emotions she felt about simply being out there.
“I mean, it’s definitely like a different me,’’ Liu said. “(Before) I really wasn’t skating for myself. You know what I’m saying? Like, if everyone in the world disappeared right now, I’d still stay, do my programs even, but before, I would never put my skates on again.”
Liu had not put on skates for 18 months prior to taking a spin (and a jump or two) in early 2024 on the Oakland, California, rink where she long had trained. Her reaction was to do it again and again until she decided to treat it as more than recreation.
“I found it was fun, unfortunately,” she said, with a wry grin. “And here I am.”
Philip Hersh is a special contributor to NBCSports.com. He has covered figure skating at the last 12 Winter Olympics.