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Less than a month after winning Olympic gold, American figure skating sensation Alysa Liu appears to have surprisingly pulled out of the World Skating Championships in Prague, Czech Republic.
Liu is no longer listed among the event’s participants on the International Skating Union (ISU) website. Her original spot is now occupied by the second alternative, Sarah Everhardt.
PK Press Club Digital has reached out to Liu’s representatives for comment.
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Alysa Liu of the United States arrives to compete in the women’s figure skating free program at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Milan, Italy, Thursday, February 19, 2026. (AP Photo/Stéphanie Scarbrough)
No reason is currently known for Liu’s sudden absence from the roster.
The move comes just days after Liu revealed on social media that she had recently been “chased” to her car by a bystander.
“So I land at the airport and there’s a crowd waiting at the exit with cameras and things for me to sign,” she wrote in an Instagram story. “All this in my personal space. Someone chased me to my car, bruh. Please don’t do this to me.”
Liu had already taken temporary retirement shortly after his first Olympic appearance in 2022. His father, Arthur Liu, said it was due to “trauma.”
“She became really unhappy,” Arthur Liu told USA Today of why she retired. “She avoided the rink at all costs. She’s traumatized. She was just traumatized. She had PTSD and she didn’t want to go near the rink.”
Before her participation in the 2022 Beijing Games, she and her father were the alleged targets of a spy operation led by the Chinese government. Liu called the experience “a little weird and exciting.”
Gold medalist Alysa Liu of Team USA poses for a photo during the women’s individual skating medal ceremony on the thirteenth day of the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games at the Milan Ice Rink on February 19, 2026 in Milan, Italy. (Jamie Squire/Getty Images)
“You know what I mean? It’s so… incredible. You know what I mean, it’s crazy,” she previously told PK Press Club Digital during a panel discussion at the USOPC Media Summit in October.
“Imagine finding that at such a young age, I mean, in a weird way, I was like, ‘Am I like on a prank show?’ Like, is this world real. Like, I must be a movie character. But I mean, it felt like it made sense to me, you know, based on everything my dad did back when he was an activist.”
Arthur Liu told the Associated Press in 2022: “They’re probably just trying to intimidate us, to…threaten us in some way to not say anything, to get them in trouble and to say anything political or related to human rights abuses in China.”
Liu made her return to the sport two years later, in 2024. By March 2025, she had already made Team USA history, becoming the first American woman to compete in the World Figure Skating Championships in 19 years. Then, in February, she made history by becoming the first American to win Olympic gold in a women’s individual figure skating competition since 2002, and the first American to win a medal in the event since 2006.
This historic victory was followed by a huge surge in popularity.
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Alysa Liu of Team USA performs in the women’s individual skating routine during a figure skating exhibition gala on the fifteenth day of the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games at the Milan Ice Rink on February 21, 2026 in Milan, Italy. (Maja Hitij/Getty Images)
Before the Olympics, she had less than 300,000 followers on Instagram. Just a week after the end of the Olympics, it surpassed 5 million. Today, at the time of publication, it has more than 7.4 million.
However, it looks like many of her new fans won’t be able to see her compete in Prague anymore.
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