MILAN — With the two gold medals around her neck, Alysa Liu looks comfortable being an Olympic champion figure skater. She sounds less comfortable about something else.
‘I don’t know if I really want to be a role model, I would say,’ Liu remarked during a small group interview that included USA TODAY Sports. ‘But I guess I am. So if anything, I just urge people to spend time with themselves, try new things, different things, just to gain experience and then decide for themselves what they want to do.
‘Taking breaks is OK, and yeah, sometimes taking a step back is what’s needed to see the full picture.’
Liu famously ‘retired’ from skating at 16 and made a comeback after a two-year hiatus.
‘Just doing me’
Liu has captured global attention not just for her exceptional skating, but her sense of style, which includes platinum stripes in her dark hair and a ‘smiley’ piercing on her frenulum.
Might young girls start to mimic her style?
‘I am just doing me,’ Liu said, ‘so it’s cool if I’m inspiring any other people. Yeah, I just have a certain fashion sense and kind of stubborn with it, so it’ll always come through.”
How long will Liu skate?
She already ‘retired’ from skating at 16. Then unretired at 20.
Now that Liu is 20, does she think she’s going to keep skating for the next few years, or will she take another break?
‘Well, I can’t imagine not skating next year,’ Liu said. ‘That’s what I’ll say.’
Getting to the bottom of it
During her hiatus from skating, Liu spent a year at UCLA and said she enjoyed studying psychology. But a career in psychology does not appear to be in her future.
“Not anymore, but I am really interested in psychology,’ she said. ‘I think it was because I was interested in myself and how I thought, especially because my childhood growing up. It was so different from most, so I just really wanted to get to the bottom of it, if that makes sense.
“And so, yeah, I’ve done a lot of internalized thinking. Introspective is the word I think I’m looking for. But, yeah, it’s helped me a lot and yeah, I love learning.’
And now that Liu has solved the mysteries of her brain —
‘I don’t know if I’ve fully solved it,’ she said. “I guess that’s the goal, but I think there’s something also beautiful about it being a mystery.’