Alysa

I was delighted to see Alysa Liu win the gold medal in women’s figure skating. She also was part of the US team’s gold medal win. What I love about her is that she gave up skating because she was burnt out, exhausted, and wanted a normal life. She did this at age 16. Now at age 20 she has two gold medals. And she smiled her way through it.

After a two-year break, she lived a normal day-to-day life filled with routines. Then she went skiing and felt exhilaration and joy. It reminded her of the thrill of skating. It sparked her to think about returning to competitive figure skating.

So, she did. But she did it differently. She returned because she wanted to and not out of a sense of obligation. She focused on enjoying the sport. She designed her own dresses. She chose to have autonomy over her career. She also, being older, felt stronger both emotionally and physically.

Since her return, she’s become a US Champion in 2025, a World Champion in 2025, and an Olympic champion in 2026. Watching her skate, you see the incredible skill she has. But you also see something you don’t often see enough. Joy. Freedom. Presence.

I think it’s what gave her the edge.

I have several tennis friends who hate tennis. They are great at tennis, but they all gave up tennis for a while. One, whose mother was a high school tennis coach, said he couldn’t play without hearing his mother’s voice in his head all the time.

Another friend who gave it up for awhile came back to it because his partner loved it. He still heard his mom’s critiques in his head, and I even heard them on the phone. I will never forget when he won a tournament and played an accomplished pro who was very good. My friend preferred clay courts. The pro he was playing liked fast courts. They played on a fast court.

It was a great match and my friend won in three sets. He was overjoyed, but mostly relieved. I think he what drove him to victory was not only a sense of accomplishment but how happy it made his partner. I reminded him that he beat this guy on a fast court, which was like beating Pete Sampras or Martina Navratilova on grass.

I was struck when he nodded and then said he needed to call his mother. I heard him tell her he won the tournament and beat this top pro. The first words out of his mother’s mouth were, “I bet it took you three sets to do it.”

My friend looked at me. I had to stifle laughing. He saw me do that. (And not well.) After he got off the phone, he started laughing too.

But he did say later, in a moment of relieved admission, “At least I didn’t have her voice in my head throughout the match. I actually enjoyed the challenge of figuring it out.”

Billie Jean King is famous for saying, “Pressure is a privilege.” I think in that moment my friend was able to find some joy in the privilege and the pressure when he was playing.

I can’t help but wonder if most top athletes have a love/hate relationship with their sport. To be really good at something takes a lot of practice, repetition, grinding it out, and patience. It takes a lot of failure, a lot of critique, and a lot of sacrifice.

As a good tennis player, I have no one’s voice nagging voice in my head. (I do have a reminder voice sometimes of this is what the pro told me to do, but it’s not incessant and domineering.) In fact, when I’m playing well, I have music in my head. I have a friend with a brilliant backhand who sings to himself when he plays well.

Alysa Liu skates like she’s the music.

In the movie “Mr. Holland’s Opus” Richard Dreyfuss as the music teacher is working with a student who has a block about playing her clarinet. She feels a lot of pressure to play well. She can’t get one place in the piece right. She’s so frustrated and crying.

He does two things to help her. Set in the 60s, he plays her a Beatles song and tells her how simple the song is, how uncomplex it is. And then he looks at her and says, “And I love it.”

In other words, he’s telling her, “It doesn’t have to be that hard.”

Then he goes on to ask her what the music she’s trying to learn makes her think of. She says it makes her think of a sunset. He tells her, “Play the sunset.”

And she relaxes and plays the song. And she smiles. (Much later in the movie she shows up as the state’s governor and plays the clarinet at his retirement party, nervous but also smiling.)

Alysa didn’t give up her training, her practice, her hard work. She had to do all of those things to skate as well as she did. But she changed her relationship to pressure. I suspect she knows what a privilege it is to skate for the opportunity of a medal at the Olympics.

But she also has another purpose. Nowhere is that more easily seen than the infectious nature she brings to the other skaters. Watching the medal ceremony at the end, you saw the shared joy. It was as magical as Liu’s skating performance.

Pressure is indeed a privilege. Joy and presence are sublime. Thank you, Alysa. May we learn from your example. Your skating is the music. Your skating is the sunset. Your life story from IVF baby to having a dad who came to this country for a better life and then made sure his daughter had one is the American dream.