How Is A Figure Skater Like A Tree?

Since returning to figure skating, Alysa Liu has displayed an indifference toward earthly happenings that a bodhisattva would envy. That is not to say that she doesn't express joy upon completing a stellar performance. But she is never particularly moved by wins or losses, which has earned her internet descriptors of "totally unbothered," "nonchalant queen," and so on. Improbably, through the pressure cooker of the Winter Olympics, she has maintained this attitude. "I'm really confident in myself, and even if I mess up and fall, that's totally OK, too," Liu said after placing third in the short program on Tuesday. "I don't know! I'm fine with any outcome, as long as I'm out there, and I am. There's nothing to lose."

It is not difficult, watching Liu in the past couple of years, to believe those words to be more than generic athletespeak—that the point for her is the performance, and external validations like medals and scores are unnecessary. Control is the long-running theme of Liu's no-longer-so-new comeback. She picks her own music, dictates what she eats, and gets more involved with her choreography. When she skates, even on the ice of the biggest competition in figure skating, this is the sense the viewer gets: that she is in total control of what is happening.

Liu's short program, set to "Promise" by Laufey, is the same program she skated to upon her return from retirement in 2024. While it is often easy to be wowed by a big, bright short program, Liu is incredible at pulling off a wistful presentation, filling the space despite such pared-back music. The unique triple Lutz–triple loop combination she jumps in the back half of her program does the technical heavy lifting for her score, and is perhaps the most eye-catching sequence—she whips from the first jump to the second with so little time in between it feels like one continuous motion—but her spins are what I return to. The final spin in particular is stunning and worth watching thrice: once to take in the full picture, once more to see how little she moves on the ice, and one last time to watch her arms.