Alysa Liu is the champion who can't stop smiling

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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Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara pulled off tear-filled comeback to win Olympic gold

Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara pulled off tear-filled comeback to win Olympic gold

Ryuichi Kihara looked crestfallen as he left the ice after the Olympic pairs short program Sunday, knowing his big mistake on a lift would be costly for him and his partner, Riku Miura.

The team’s coach, Bruno Marcotte, quickly tried to temper Kihara’s disappointment, which would increase when he heard the scores that put the reigning world champions from Japan in 5th place heading into Monday’s free skate.

“It’s not over,” Marcotte insisted to Kihara, then repeated. “It’s not over.”

How right he was.

And how different Kihara’s emotions were when it was over, even if someone watching without knowing the context might have wondered why he was bawling, his face contorted by the tears of joy just a few hours after he had finished crying tears of distress.

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In pairs skating, Deanna Stellato-Dudek succeeds in 10-year quest

In pairs skating, Deanna Stellato-Dudek succeeds in 10-year quest

The results will tell you that Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps of Canada finished 14th of 19 teams in Sunday’s pairs short program at the 2026 Winter Olympics.

The results won’t tell that just by skating, Stellato-Dudek had succeeded in what seemed an utterly quixotic quest when she began it 10 years ago, that she had realized an improbable dream that nearly became an impossible one two weeks ago.

Stellato-Dudek, of course, couldn’t see it quite that way right now. The fierce competitive fire that carried her and Deschamps to the world title two years ago won’t be entirely banked by knowing that at age 42, she had become the oldest woman to compete in Olympic figure skating since 1928 and the third oldest in history, according to Olympedia.org.

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Jason Brown finds pursuit of perfection a frustrating need

Jason Brown finds pursuit of perfection a frustrating need

LAKE PLACID, N.Y. – There are some who would presume that Jason Brown’s universal acclaim as a performer would be enough accolades for him.

That could not be further from the truth.

“I’m competitive, and I really want people to take me seriously,” Brown said.

That means getting good results as well as the loud applause he heard throughout his 2-minute, 45-second short program at Saatva Skate America, the U.S. stop on the sport’s Grand Prix Series.

To do that, Brown cannot have mistakes like those on two flawed triple jumps. They left him in a distant 5th place in a field of 12 heading into the free skate, when those ahead of him will have even more wiggle room because there are more jumping passes to use for quads.

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How Alysa Liu rediscovered figure skating and came out of retirement

How Alysa Liu rediscovered figure skating and came out of retirement

How did Alysa Liu get to this point, to where she is skating in this weekend’s Budapest Trophy in Hungary, her first real competition in two and a half years?

How and why did she return to the spotlight after purposefully retreating to the shadows, her break from being ALYSA LIU (drum roll) so complete that she also broke from social media, then began posting photos in which alysa liu (whisper) often turned her face from the camera or made it indistinct.

At age 13, Liu had stood the figure skating world on its head. At 16, soon after skating at the 2022 Winter Olympics and winning a bronze medal at the 2022 World Championships, Liu retired from the sport.

She did some post-Olympic shows and did not skate at all for nearly a year and a half. At 19, a sophomore at UCLA, she is competing again.

Talk about things turning upside down.

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