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American figure skating star Alysa Liu won gold in the Grand Prix final in Japan on Saturday, winning her second international medal in 2025 before her return to the Olympics in February.
Liu edged out Japanese teen sensation Nakai Ami by less than two points to win first place.
“My performance definitely gives me confidence, in my stamina and my consistency,” Liu said, according to Olympics.com. “I think a lot can happen between now and the Olympics. I still have nationals, they still have nationals, and I’ll be working.
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Gold medalist Alysa Liu poses for a photo after winning the women’s world championship during the 2025 ISU World Figure Skating Championships at TD Garden in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 28, 2025. (Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
Liu 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 American champion in history when she triumphed at the age of 13 in 2019 and then defended her title the following year.
When she competed in the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, she came under the shadow of a federal investigation into a Chinese spy investigation against her and her father. Liu’s father had become a target of Chinese spies due to his involvement in the 1989 assassination. Protests in Tiananmen Square.
“Imagine finding out that at such a young age. I mean, in a weird way, I was like, ‘Am I like on some prank show?’ Is this world real? I must be some movie character. But, I mean, it was like it made sense to me, you know, because of everything my father did in his activist days,” Liu told Pak Gazette Digital at the USOPC Media Summit in October.
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(left) FBI agent, (center) Alysa Liu, (right) Chinese army (Maddie Meyer/Getty Images, Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images, PHILIPPE LOPEZ/AFP via Getty Images)
Liu continued to compete at the Beijing Winter Games, but with greater 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 individual competition and won a team bronze medal, before beginning her brief retirement.
Liu decided skating had become less fun and more of a job, and she wanted to focus on being a normal college student. It wasn’t until he went on a ski trip and felt the rush of competition (albeit in a very different way and with much lower risks) that he began to think about returning.
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Early last year, he made it official with a cryptic social media post. And although the road back to a notoriously fickle sport was filled with obstacles, Liu took a big step forward with his second-place finish behind Glenn at the U.S. championships.
Then, coming out of retirement in early 2024, Liu dethroned three-time defending champion Kaori Sakamoto of Japan at the World Figure Skating Championships last March. She became the first American woman to win a title since Kimmie Meissner in 2006.
Alysa Liu poses after winning gold in the women’s program at the ISU Grand Prix of figure skating Skate America at Herb Brooks Arena in Lake Placid, New York, on November 16, 2025. (Jamie Squire/Getty Images)
He now has his eyes set on the Milan-Cortina Olympics in February, as one of Team USA’s most dramatic stories.
He does not rule out seeing his life and experience in an international espionage incident adapted to film.
Still, he has some preferences if his story makes it to the big screen.
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“They have to make me look like some cool hero or something. And I can’t just be the girl who got spied on and didn’t do anything about it,” she said. “But honestly, I would focus on my father’s story, because his story is great and also like everything that happened because of what he did, so I feel like we have to start with the roots.”
