Olympic pressure just doesn't work for Alysa Liu. Ask if she's feeling the heat, and she barely suppresses a laugh. Follow up with a query about her goals for Milano Cortina, and the usual ambitions of a reigning World champion — winning gold, making the podium, skating a personal best — don't come up.
 
"I validate myself, and I can completely do that alone," Liu, 20, reasons. "So medals, they don't make me feel greater than I am, or more than other people. [Winning] doesn't make me feel better about my programs or what I do or what I put out. It doesn't translate, if that makes sense."
 
Instead, it's all about her choreography, her ideas, her costumes.

 
"Some of my life story is in my programs, and to share that and have that be seen, and hopefully it resonates with people — or they kind of feel what I feel in my programs — that's what I want," she says. "What am I going to do with my experiences, if I don't share them?"
 
"I love watching movies, and I feel like I can really step into a character's shoes and live their life," she adds. "And I just love art like that, and so I want to [let people step into my shoes], and not even just in skating. I want to do that through photography, I want to do that through fashion, I want to do that through storytelling. Whatever tools I have to share my ideas, bring it on."
 
That's Liu: unpredictable, disarming, a bit of a rebel. Conventional wisdom doesn't apply, not with a skater who won two U.S. titles [2019, 2020] by the age of 14, placed sixth at the 2022 Beijing Games and then  won a bronze medal at the 2022 World Figure Skating Championships, only to retire. And with her record since returning to competition after a two-season break — including the 2025 World title, 2025 Grand Prix Final crown and two U.S. silver medals — who can blame her for making her own rules?
 
"I almost feel like I'm not even swimming in the tide, I'm swimming somewhere else completely," she says. "And I'm not swimming against anything. I feel like I'm carrying (myself) along."
 
Take her free skate at the 2026 U.S. Figure Skating Championships in St. Louis, Missouri, last month. With a trip to the Games a month away, most skaters leap at the chance to test out their Olympic program one more time. But Liu had unfinished business: she wanted to show her free skate to Lady Gaga hits, re-tooled since its one and only performance in September. So she used it, and not the "MacArthur Park" routine she plans for Milano Cortina.
 
"Because Olympics are soon, there's going to be more attention on us," she explains. "And I want more of my ideas out there so they all get seen. You know, because there's the internet now, people can go back and see what you've done. And so I want to add to my portfolio, get it seen by everybody."
 
Calling work product a "portfolio" is more typical of an artist, than an athlete. It's a distinction Liu embraces.
 
"Well, I'm not really a skater, I really do feel like I'm more of an artist," she says. "So my reality is a little bit different than what maybe the general public imagines it to be or perceives it to be. So my decisions make, actually, a lot of sense, if you think about what I like to do, and I guess my goals."
 
Phillip DiGuglielmo has worked with Liu since she was 5 and with Massimo Scali coaches the skater in Oakland, California. To him, it is her athleticism — the technical element score [TES] for her free skate at the 2025 World Championships was more than six points over the field — that feeds her artistic ambitions.
 
"Alysa does the technical elements with such beauty and ability that the artistry can shine," DiGuglielmo says. "Massimo and I, we celebrate Alysa and her feeling of being an artist …. I can watch Massimo do choreography with her, and I'm saying, 'OK, I need it to turn this way, or can we have this turn here?' And then all of a sudden, she takes it, she does it, and she brings it to another level. And I just look at Massimo, and he looks back at me, and we go, 'Oh God, this is magic.'"
 
So, can Liu add working as a choreographer to her artistic aspirations?
 
"Massimo is my choreographer, he's really good," she says. "I put in my ideas, here and there,  especially with arms. Sometimes I have this weird thing about arms; it has to feel like it flows, the way you twist your body with your arms. I'm particular with it. But I wouldn't call myself a choreographer — maybe one day."
 
With all the success of the past two seasons, there are still a few mountains Liu wants to climb. At the U.S. Championships, she challenged herself by adding a rare combination, triple Lutz-triple loop, to the bonus second half of her short program, set to Laufey's "Promise." At Olympics, she would like to show a triple Axel, the jump she first landed in international competition in 2018 at age 12 but recognizes it may not be ready.
 
"I do want to do it; it would probably be in my short, I don't think there's any room in my free skate to put it. It would change it around too much, and things would get off beat," she says. "It wouldn't disrupt anything in my short program. But I have to talk to my team. I think I do want to do it at Olympics."
 
DiGuglielmo isn't quite sold. The plan was to add the triple Axel back into Liu's repertoire this season, but other priorities took precedence.
 
"The problem with triple Axel is the amount of energy it takes to do 10 attempts is probably  equivalent to running three free skate programs," he says. "We have to really limit it, because sometimes she'll be so close and they'll be really good, and she's like, 'I want to do one more.' And then by the time she does one more, she's actually expended so much energy that the run-through of the program is going to get pushed to the next session."
 
The coach also questions whether the triple Axel's value [8 points] justifies its risk, especially if technical panels judge it to be under-rotated.
 
"If you go back and look at Alysa's [protocols], she got an under-rotation on the triple Axel at [2022] Olympics and [2022] Worlds when she did it," he says. "And by the time a triple Axel gets called under, and then the judges have to reduce their [Grade of Execution] mark, it's actually worth less than what a good double Axel is worth [about 4.30]. So in that situation, the risk-reward is not there."
 
Will Liu follow her coaches' advice, and save the triple Axel for another time? Or will it make an appearance in Milano Cortino? For artists, there are few rules governing the stories they want to tell. But even Liu knows most good stories are grounded in reality.
 
"I can't go just from like zero to 100, I have to ease into it the Axel," she says. "But yeah, I want to do it, if the training works. We'll have to see. I hope it does, though."
 
For the full competition schedule, television schedule, bios, news and more, visit the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026 Competition Central.