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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