I was wrong about Alysa Liu

and her crazy hair

I admit I didn’t like her hair.

I cringed when I saw it. My teenager daughter thought it was cool. My husband thought it was punk rock.

But I just kept thinking about the big picture, about how one day she would look back at her Olympics photos and regret her crazy hair.

It is exactly this kind of Big Picture, rational, judgemental perspective that keeps certain people small, obsessed with image and reputation and perfectionist tendencies, while artists and athletes like Alysa Liu take their places in history.

I was so wrong about Alysa Liu. When she said she wasn’t in Milan for the medals, that she just wanted to have fun, my inner critic thought that wasn’t the vibe of a gold medalist. Some part of me thought the real winners had to be laser focused, delusional in their destiny, hungry for the competition.

The Universe doesn’t reward the one who doesn’t care….right?

Photo by Robin Ritross

And then all week we watched her laugh and skate loosely and flaunt her non-traditional hair and piercings all the way to near perfect performances. We watched media packages where she claims skating is not her life, it’s just a thing she does. Her contemporaries must hate her for that, I thought. Because it seems it is their life and not a side gig. People have given up so much to be at the Olympic games. And here was Alysa giggling like it was a girl’s trip.

But she was focused, just on a different thing than we’re used to. And she was fulfilling her destiny, she just carried it really differently than we’ve ever seen in that arena.

I watched her skate last night and, like everyone else, was in total awe for the full 4 minutes. Her performance was unlike anyone else. She was literally laughing. Her hips were loose like she was on a dance floor with the best DJ and not like she’d been given precise choreography. She was so fun to watch. There was no tension in her or in us, her audience that wasn’t holding their breath each time she leapt into the air because somehow over the few days of following her trajectory, the attitude was contagious. What mattered was the joy of her routine and not the pain you and tension so often present in this sport.

And then, in the interview after her historic win, she answered that she doesn’t get nervous when she skates because that’s when she’s finally getting to show you her art.

She implies that skating for an audience is the REWARD and not the pinnacle.

That all the work has come before (though with Liu you get the sense that even that work was fun for her in this new iteration of her career after her original retirement), and the competition isn’t THE THING, that’s the cherry on top. The process, the journey, the mastering is THE THING.

"If I fell on every jump, I would still be wearing this dress, so it's all good,” Alysa Liu said. Tang Xinyu / VCG via Getty Images

And, wow. I needed to see that in such perfectly embodied action.

I was wrong about Alysa Liu and now I’m not. She will not look back on her 2026 Olympics pictures and regret that hair. She will look back, like all of us will, and see what really mattered. She skated the most fun 4 minutes she could give. And she won.

PS - this quote from her coach made me laugh: “You know, in 1976, Dorothy Hamill won, and she made that haircut famous.”

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