Alysa Liu: On Her Own Terms
At sixteen, Alysa Liu was the most accomplished young figure skater in America: the youngest national champion in the sport's history, the first American woman to land three triple Axels in competition, an Olympian, a World medalist. Two weeks after that medal, she posted a lowercase goodbye on Instagram and walked away from all of it. She would later reach for a single word for what the sport had made of her. Not athlete. Not champion. Puppet.
Behind the records was a childhood spent as an instrument. Other people chose her programs, her music, the dresses she wore. Her body was weighed and optimized by adults she had not picked, and for two years she lived alone in a Colorado dorm, training in isolation until, she has said, a coach told her she could not drink water. By the time she left, the damage had a name, and she avoided the ice the way other people avoid the scene of an accident.
Then, almost three years later, she came back. Taller, older, on her own terms, with her own coaches and her own music and her own reasons. The comeback was so improbable that the first person she called to help her train spent three hours trying to talk her out of it. Eighteen months after she stepped onto a scuffed public rink to find out whether her body still remembered, she was a world champion. A year after that, in a gold dress under the lights of Milan, she won Olympic gold that no one had chosen for her and became the most famous skater on earth.
On Her Own Terms is the story of what happens after a prodigy burns down the life that was built for her. It traces the quiet war for control of a young woman's life: a father who fled China by boat after Tiananmen Square and built a million-dollar machine around his daughter, a government that courted and then surveilled her, and a sport that consumes its young and calls it development. It is a portrait of control and the cost of taking it back. A daughter, a dissident, and the most improbable comeback in modern figure skating.
Drawn entirely from the public record, this is an independent, unauthorized account, not affiliated with Alysa Liu, her family, or any skating federation.
Customer Reviews
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
