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U.S. figure skating star Alysa Liu won gold at the Grand Prix Final in Japan on Saturday, winning her second international medal in 2025 ahead of her return to the Olympics in February.
Liu bested Japan's teen sensation Nakai Ami by less than two points to win the top spot.
"My performance definitely does give me confidence, in my stamina and in my consistency," Liu said, per Olympics.com. "I think a lot of things can happen between now and the Olympics. I still have nationals - they still have nationals - and I will be working.
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Liu only just returned to the sport last year after an early retirement following her first Olympic performance in 2022. She was once considered a rising star as the youngest U.S. champ ever when she triumphed at the age of 13 in 2019 and then defended her title the next year.
When she competed at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, it came under the shadow of a federal investigation into a Chinese spying investigation against her and her father. Liu's father had become a target of Chinese spies due to his involvement in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
"Like, imagine finding that out at such a young age, I mean, like In a weird way, I was like, 'Am I like in some prank show?' Like, is this world real like I must be some movie character. But, I mean, it was like it made sense to me, you know, from like everything my dad did back in his activist days," Liu told Fox News Digital at the USOPC Media Summit in October.
Liu still went on to compete in the Beijing Winter Games, but with heightened security assurances from the State Department and USOPC. She had at least two people escorting her at all times.
She went on to finish sixth in the women's singles competition and won a bronze team medal, before beginning her brief retirement.
Liu decided skating had become less of a joy and more of a job, and she wanted to focus on being a normal college student. It wasn’t until she went on a ski trip and felt the rush of competition — albeit in a much different way, and with far lower stakes — that she began to think about a comeback.
Early last year, she made it official with a cryptic post on social media. And while the path back in a notoriously fickle sport was bumpy, Liu took a big step forward with her second-place finish to Glenn at the U.S. championships.
Then after coming out of retirement in early 2024, Liu dethroned three-time defending champion Kaori Sakamoto of Japan at the World Figure Skating Championships this past March. She became the first American woman to claim a title since Kimmie Meissner in 2006.
Now she has her eyes set on the Milano-Cortina Olympics in February, as one of Team USA's most dramatic stories.
She hasn't ruled out seeing her life, and experience in an international spying incident, adapted into a movie.
Still, she has some preferences if her story makes it onto the silver screen.
"They gotta make me look like super cool hero or something. And just, I can't just be the kid that got spied on and did nothing about it," she said. "But Honestly, I would just have the main focus be like my dad's story, because like his story is so cool and like also just like everything that only happened because of what he did, so, like I feel like we got to start with the roots."
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