Alysa Liu wins Grand Prix Final gold before Olympics return

American figure skating star Alysa Liu won gold in the Grand Prix Final in Japan on Saturday, winning her second international medal of 2025 before her return to the Olympics in February.

Liu beat Japanese teenage sensation Nakai Ami by less than two points to claim first place.

“My performance definitely gives me confidence in my endurance and consistency,” Liu said, according to Olympics.com. “I think a lot can happen between now and the Olympics. I still have national championships – they still have national championships – and I’m going to work.

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Liu only 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 ever when she triumphed at the age of 13 in 2019, then defended her title the following year.

When she competed in the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, it took place amid a federal investigation into a Chinese spy probe against her and her father. Liu’s father had become a target of Chinese spies because of his involvement in the 1989 attacks. Tiananmen Square protests.

“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’m supposed to be a character in a movie. But I mean, it felt like it made sense to me, you know, based on everything my dad was doing back when he was an activist,” Liu told PK Press Club Digital at the USOPC Media Summit in October.

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(left) FBI agent, (middle) Alysa Liu, (right) Chinese military (Maddie Meyer/Getty Images, Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images, PHILIPPE LOPEZ/AFP via Getty Images)

Liu still participated in the Beijing Winter Games, but with heightened security guarantees from the State Department and USOPC. She was accompanied at all times by at least two people.

She finished sixth in the women’s singles competition and won a team bronze medal, before beginning her brief retirement.

Liu decided skating had become less of a joy and no longer a job, and she wanted to focus on being a normal student. It wasn’t until she went on a ski trip and felt the thrill of competition – albeit in a much different way and with much lower stakes – that she began to think about a comeback.

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Early last year, she made it official with a cryptic social media post. And although the road back in a notoriously fickle sport has been rocky, Liu took a big step forward by finishing second to Glenn at the U.S. championships.

Then, after retiring in early 2024, Liu fallen Kaori Sakamoto, three-time reigning champion 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 Skate America ISU Grand Prix of Figure Skating at Herb Brooks Arena in Lake Placid, New York on November 16, 2025. (Jamie Squire/Getty Images)

She now has her eyes set on the Milan-Cortina Olympics in February as one of Team USA’s most dramatic stories.

She has not ruled out seeing her life and experience in an international espionage incident made into a film.

Still, she has certain preferences if her story appears on the big screen.

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“They have to make me look like a super cool hero or something. And I can’t be the kid who was spied on and didn’t do anything,” she said. “But honestly, I just want the focus to be on my dad’s story, because his story is so cool and also everything that happened only happened because of what he did, so I feel like we have to start at the roots.”