Phillip DiGuglielmo began to see the handwriting on the wall not long after murals of Alysa Liu went up in Oakland and suburban Los Angeles.
For two weeks after Liu won the Olympic women’s singles title Feb. 19 in Milan, she and DiGuglielmo, her coach, still planned on going to Prague later this month so she could defend her world title.
“I knew her training wouldn’t be optimal, but we’re used to that,” DiGuglielmo said by telephone. “But this was going to be far from optimal.”
He understood that it was time for Liu to optimize the things coming her way since she became a sensation at the Olympics.
“She is just exploding,” he said. “Even her agents are overwhelmed. You have to balance what is her opportunity to build her brand versus going to worlds.”
By last Friday, she and her team agreed it was best for Liu to withdraw from the World Championships.
Her decision was noted on the International Skating Union’s worlds entry list, where her status was changed to “substitute.” There was no comment from anyone involved until Liu confirmed it on a Sunday Instagram post she concluded with, “See yall next season!!”
“I was a little let down,” the coach said, “but I knew this was reality.”
And then she was off to France to attend the Louis Vuitton show Tuesday at Paris Fashion week, sporting an outfit and bag from the very high-end retailer. GQ and Vogue featured her at the show on their Instagram pages.
She flew to Paris Sunday and was to get back to California Wednesday, in time to join the City of Oakland’s celebration of its hometown heroine Thursday at noon Pacific time.
Will a Louis Vuitton deal follow? Will there be a movie? A book? Books?
One thing seems certain: Liu will hardly be out of sight until the next skating season begins late this summer.
She is scheduled to perform in the Japanese and U.S. tours of Stars on Ice, the latter with 26 shows from mid-April to late May.
And right now, people can’t get enough of her — so much so, alas, that she posted a plea on Instagram for fans to give her some space after she was swarmed by people wanting pictures after her flight from New York landed in San Francisco a week ago. How ironic it now seems that when Liu was asked a couple hours after winning about how she intended to deal with public attention, she joked about wearing wigs.
DiGuglielmo said it was during that flight, which followed two full days of media commitments in New York, that an exhausted Liu realized how hard (impossible?) it would be to do worlds.
There is no way to make any fair comparison between Liu’s popularity and that of past U.S. women who became stars transcending the sport after winning the Olympic singles gold medal, like Peggy Fleming (1968) and Dorothy Hamill (1976). Or Michelle Kwan, the most beloved and decorated U.S. skater of the past 50 years, even if neither of Kwan’s two Olympic medals were gold.
All three had skating careers that predate the social media era. Fleming’s and Hamill’s predate the internet era and the cable TV era.
All three became household names in the United States. Perhaps the attention on them was counterintuitive, because the media landscape had not yet fragmented into a zillion niches.
That meant the public essentially got its news and entertainment from a handful of widely watched and read places, which concentrated the attention on stars.
Counting Instagram followers is likely a flawed measure of popularity, but Liu’s numbers are so startling they are worth noting.
Ninety days ago, she had some 150,000 followers. Today, that number is 7.6 million. She added 2.8 million in the three-day span that followed her singles triumph.
The spotlight loves her. She loves the spotlight. What a change that is from four years ago, when she broke from social media and then began posting photos in which she either turned her face from the camera or made it indistinct.
“I told Alysa that this didn’t happen just because she won the Olympics,” DiGuglielmo said. “It was how she won — showing the world she loves to do what she does.”
Her age group, Gen Z, loves Liu’s unwillingness to conform to the sport’s ice princess image, as evidenced by her frenulum piercing, her tree-ring-striped hair, her dressing in ‘90s era grunge for an appearance on the Tonight Show, her use of Gen-Z slang (this O.F. had to look up what “mog” means.)
Older generations, some of whom dislike how much figure skating has valued jumps, love the way Liu prioritizes entertainment over competition, even though she also thrives on competition. New York Times dance critic Gia Kourlas did a thoughtful story last week headlined, “Alysa Liu on Dancing Her Way to Gold: ‘The Music Carries My Body.’”
It became, as DiGuglielmo put it, a case of “art imitates life imitates art.”
The 1978 Donna Summer cover of “MacArthur Park” that Liu skated to in her long program keeps spiking upward on music charts, ranking No. 1 on one of Billboard’s digital sales listings, according to Forbes.com.
Her music for the Olympic gala, PinkPantheress and Zara Larsson’s version of “Stateside,” released in a remixed version last October, hit No. 1 on Spotify U.S. after the Olympics.
There are dozens (hundreds?) of videos on social media with people imitating Liu’s arm and body movements at the start of the song.
Artists chalk a portrait of figure skater Alysa Liu who won an Olympic gold medal at the Lake Worth Beach Street Painting Festival in Florida.
Artists chalk a portrait of Alysa Liu at the Lake Worth Beach Street Painting Festival in Florida. (GREG LOVETT/PALM BEACH POST / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images)
Everyone was captivated by how much Liu smiled during her Olympic performances and how much she supported her competitors, damning past convention by jumping out of the seat the leader occupies and walking a few feet to congratulate each of the Japanese women who skated right after her and would join her on the awards podium, Kaori Sakamoto and Ami Nakai.
When a grinning Liu left the ice herself after her commanding free skate, she expressed her pleasure in classic Alysa style by saying, “That’s what I’m f—-ing talking about.” That has since been turned into an acronym: “twifta.”
And anyone aware of Liu’s complicated back story (and not just the skating part), which involved quitting a sport in which she was joylessly engaged as a marionette before coming back two years later as the one in control, simply could not stop feeling her delight.
If you need a refresher, you can go back to the longform stories I wrote at the height of her first career and the beginning of her comeback and my NBCOlympics.com coverage of her victory in Milan. You can also try Harper’s Bazaar, Teen Vogue, Rolling Stone, Elle or the marvelous profile by former Washington Post sports writer Les Carpenter.
In all the recounting of her background and of her appealing persona, it has been easy to forget that the basic sports story is equally compelling.
Who comes back to competition after a 30-month break, wins the world title with two flawless skates seven months later and then the Olympics a year after that? Only someone who takes practice seriously, even if she now takes a break from it when she wants or needs to.
“I told a friend a few months ago that if she wins the Olympics and everything around her goes crazy, I’m going to say, ‘It all went according to plan,’” DiGuglielmo deadpanned. “That’s my line, and I’m sticking to it.”
Not only were her Olympic programs a balm for the spirit, but they were also technically near flawless, with just one of her 19 elements in the short and the free skate getting a negative grade of execution (and that was just -0.17).
Her spins were eye-catching, her movement smooth, her jumps secure — so secure, in fact, that when she finished the Olympics, Liu had done 221 jumps in 150 jumping passes without a fall. That streak dates to the first competition of her comeback, in September 2024.
In her first career, Liu was being trained to be a rival to the young Russian women who, by 2018, had started jumping over the moon, winning gold and silver medals at the 2018 and 2022 Olympics. That meant learning the high value jumps, called Ultra-C, including triple Axels and quads.
By Liu’s accounts, her training atmosphere in which she tried to meet that standard was relentlessly unpleasant, with little chance for any of her personality or preferences in music or costumes to emerge. Repetitive attempts at the big jumps left her with an injured hip.
She had been a good little soldier who won back-to-back U.S. senior titles at ages 13 and 14 in 2019 and 2020, the youngest ever to do so.
She landed clean triple Axels and became the first U.S. woman to land a clean quad. She made the 2022 Olympics and won a world bronze medal at 16 and tossed her skates into a closet, where they sat untouched for 18 months.
The Covid pandemic that started in winter 2020, which closed down rinks in much of North America, became her first time to breathe and think about where her life might lead.
She began to follow her own path in her own way after retiring from the sport, spending time with friends and her four younger siblings, going skiing, getting her driver’s license, hiking to Mount Everest base camp, starting college at UCLA.
She wanted the freedom to be more than a skater when she returned, and her new coaching team, DiGuglielmo and choreographer Massimo Scali, gave it to her. That was the condition Liu insisted upon before beginning the comeback. She wanted skating to be a pleasure and to have the key role in planning her career.
Then she gave millions the pleasure of her company at the Olympics, whether they were with her in the Milan arena or sitting in front of a TV or watching TikTok videos on a phone.
“And she did it by being her most authentic self,” said DiGuglielmo, 56. “We’re searching for the soul of what our sport wants to be, to have it be something that inspires people instead of a sport where people look miserable doing it.”
At 20, Alysa Liu had become a skater for this age and for the ages.
Philip Hersh, who has covered figure skating at the last 13 Winter Olympics, is a special contributor to NBCSports.com.
