The lights inside the rink at the Milano Cortina Games didn’t just illuminate the ice, they shined a light on history. 

Not since Sarah Hughes stunned the world in Salt Lake City had an American woman stood atop the Olympic podium, and the last woman to medal in figure skating was Sasha Cohen — who took silver in 2006. 

Now, 20-year-old Alysa Liu has joined them.

Liu dazzled on Thursday during the women’s free skating competition at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan, scoring a season-best 150.20 in the competition for a total score of 226.79.

Liu entered in third place, trailing Japan’s Ami Nakai by just over two points and sitting less than a point behind Kaori Sakamoto after delivering a pristine 76.59 in Tuesday’s short program — a career best under Olympic pressure. It was technical. It was clean. It was hers.

Liu’s performance in the free skate competition catapulted her into first place, but Nakai and Sakamoto still had to skate. Liu anxiously waited as her Japanese rivals took the ice, hoping her score would hold up.

In the end it did, ending the United States’ 24-year gold-medal drought in women’s figure skating.

Liu was born in Clovis and skates out of Oakland’s St. Moritz Ice Skating Club. She entered competition on Thursday in the women’s free skate with a chance to rewrite history. 

Earlier in these Games, Liu helped secure Olympic gold for Team USA in the team event, finishing second in the short program behind Sakamoto and anchoring a collective triumph.

“I really loved doing the team event,” she said earlier this month. “The Olympic team felt a little different and really special.” 

Liu became the youngest U.S. champion in history when she won at the age of 13. By the time she qualified for the Beijing Olympics at 16 — when she finished sixth — she was labeled the next in line of American figure skating royalty behind Kristi Yamaguchi, Michelle Kwan and Tara Lipinski.

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However, Liu got burned out and briefly retired after the 2022 Olympics, enrolling at nearby UCLA to study psychology. 

“I really despised skating,” she said. “Through time, I realized it doesn’t have to be like that.”

Liu returned to skating in 2024, and last year she became the first American woman to win a world title since Kimmie Meissner in 2006. In Milan, she arrived not as a prodigy but as an artist.

I love the process of creating things,” she said. “Skating is one way to express myself.”

That ethos carried her through Thursday’s free skate, whether the blades carved gold or simply closure. She has insisted all week she doesn’t measure herself against Nakai or Sakamoto.

“Whether I beat them or not is not my goal. My goal is just to do my programs and share my story,” she said.

The rest of the American contingent faltered. Amber Glenn finished fifth. Isabeau Levito slid to 12th. That left Liu — in the group nicknamed the “Blade Angels” — as the last American woman within striking distance of ending the Olympic drought. She rose to the occasion.

Liu doesn’t skate to carry a nation anymore. She skates because she wants to. Because training is her playground. Because competition is her “guilty pleasure.” Because the rink no longer owns her — she owns it.

She once quit the sport to save herself.

Now she skates like someone who came back on her own terms, and she has a gold medal to prove it.