Alysa Liu's new reality: fame, fashion and the fast lane

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Alysa Liu's new reality: fame, fashion and the fast lane

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.

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Alysa Liu is the champion who can't stop smiling

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Alysa Liu is the champion who can't stop smiling

You write this screenplay for a biopic about a figure skater and take it to Hollywood.

You start with a kid whose immigrant father puts her on the ice at age 5. You skip ahead to show her as a 13-year-old beating adults to win national titles when she is too young to compete at even the junior level internationally. You get her to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing when she is just 16.

You have her retire a few months later because she hates a sport that is no longer what she wants to do, hates that it has consumed her life.

You have a great section where she tosses her skates into a closet, where they stay while she hangs out with her friends and four siblings and starts college. Then you watch her take them out 18 months later, go to a rink and land a triple jump as if she never had been away. You see her convince her old coaches to take her back because she wants to compete again — on her terms, not someone else’s.

You make the kid who once saw her sport as a grim exercise to be endured turn into a young woman who can’t stop smiling as she skates and practices skating and, heck, maybe even as she sleeps.

And that’s not even the half of it (don’t forget the spies) before you get to the final scene.

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Chen's autobiography provides a rare revelatory look at the man who won Olympic skating gold a year ago

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Chen's autobiography provides a rare revelatory look at the man who won Olympic skating gold a year ago

The idea of covering figure skating is something of a contradiction in terms.

Oxymoronic, if you will, like covering all individual sports, in which athletes compete infrequently, train all over the world, and the media rarely sees them in practice.  A far cry from my experiences covering pro football, baseball and hockey, when I saw the athletes nearly every day. The latter is what a journalist thinks of as covering a sport.

I wrote about Nathan Chen’s figure skating career for seven years, beginning with the 2016 U.S. Championships, which would be one of his many history-making performances.

I saw him only at competitions, when the chances to have insightful conversations are minimal.

Even though Chen was gracious enough to do several one-on-one telephone interviews with me, they were generally brief – even if he always spoke so fast you could get 20-minutes-worth of answers in a 15-minute call.

So I never had any misconceptions about really knowing Chen or his family or what he (and they) went through in the nearly 20 years between his putting on skates for the first time and his winning the men’s singles gold medal at the Olympics exactly one year ago.

Sure, there snippets of “revelations,” one coming soon after Chen’s Olympic triumph when his coach, Rafael Arutunian, mentioned giving Chen back money his mother had paid for lessons because he knew how pressed they were for funds.  And, in doing a story about his years taking ballet, I learned from his teachers what a quick study and gifted dancer he was.

But how little I or anyone outside the shy Chen’s inner circle knew about him became apparent in reading his recently published autobiography, “One Jump at a Time,” written with Time magazine’s Alice Park.

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Still just 16, Alysa Liu has met the challenges of going from insouciant prodigy to world medalist

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Still just 16, Alysa Liu has met the challenges of going from insouciant prodigy to world medalist

You look at Alysa Liu, and you see a 16-year-old with braces, and it doesn’t seem possible she still is that young because of how much has happened to her in the past four years, all of it in the public eye.

Liu has gone through adolescence under the relentless glare of a spotlight she attracted in January 2019, at age 13, by becoming the youngest U.S. women’s singles champion ever. She was a prodigy who would bear huge expectations for two seasons before she was even eligible to compete at the senior level in her sport.

It all was so easy at the start, with one landmark achievement after another, a second U.S. title in 2020, victories on the Junior Grand Prix circuit, history-making triple axel and quadruple jumps.

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Figure skating at 2022 Olympics a trip - from sublime to absurd to sublime

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Figure skating at 2022 Olympics a trip - from sublime to absurd to sublime

It all started routinely, with a team event in which the medalists finished in the expected order (ROC-USA-JPN), and Russian Olympic Committee’s Kamila Valieva unsurprisingly became the first woman to land a quadruple jump in the Olympics.

After that, the 2022 Winter Olympics figure skating competition went from the sublime to the absurd to the sublime.

The team event was over only a day when the cancellation of its formal medal ceremony led to a week in which doping (especially Russia’s doping), pitiless training methods and the sad collapse of Valieva, the 15-year-old at the center of the story, turned into a firestorm as depressing as it was devastating.

Within a few hours of a story by Olympic specialist website Inside the Games that a legal issue about doping had prevented the team event medals from being presented, the website reported the case involved Valieva, the heavy favorite in women’s singles.

Valieva’s positive doping result from a December test, the bureaucratic laxity that followed, the decision that allowed her to compete in singles – it all brought recrimination, tears, anger and numbness as Valieva staggered under the weight of it, and the world watched in dismay.

How sadly bizarre was it that Court of Arbitration for Sport rulings on figure skating matters were as significant as nearly anything that happened on the ice?

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