American Olympic figure skater Alysa Liu is hanging up her skates.
Two months after finishing seventh during the controversial women’s event at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, the 16-year-old announced she’s retiring from the sport after “about 11 years on the ice.”
“I’m here to announce that i am retiring from skating,” Liu wrote on Instagram Saturday. “I feel so satisfied with how my skating career has gone. now that i’m finally done with my goals in skating i’m going to be moving on with my life… this skating thing has taught me a lot more about life than i anticipated. i’m really glad i skated.”
Liu is the youngest woman to ever win the U.S. national senior title at age 13 in 2019 and successfully defended her title in 2020 with a national scoring record of 235.52, becoming the youngest two-time champion.
She won bronze at the 2022 world championships in France last month.
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Liu started skating at age five. She made her first junior international competitive debut in August 2019 and became the first junior American woman to land a quadruple jump in competition. She was also the first woman to successfully complete a triple axel and a quad in the same program.
“It’s been an insane 11 years,” Liu captioned photos from her skating career. “I honestly never thought i would’ve accomplished as much as i did LMAOO i’m so happy.”
Liu, 16, was the youngest of Team USA’s three women’s individual skaters in Beijing, alongside Mariah Bell and Karen Chen. Liu finished eighth after the short program, but climbed to seventh place after her long program.
“I am really happy,” Liu said after her short program on Feb. 15. “I just can’t believe I actually did a clean short program today, because I’ve trained so much. I’m just really glad that all my training paid off, because I’m here competing. And the goal of my whole life and my skating career was to compete at the Olympics, so now I can officially say I’m an ‘Olympian.’ “
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Her Olympic experience was not without controversy.
After Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva was allowed to continue competing at the Beijing Olympics despite testing positive for a banned substance, Liu’s father, Arthur Liu, said the decision “totally destroys the Olympic spirit” for clean athletes.
“It is going to be very hard for all the clean athletes to see that the Russians are doping and they are going to walk away, run away with all the medals and you can’t do anything about it,” Arthur Liu told the website “Defector” in February. “Why would you want to put your kids into a sport that is so obviously rigged?”
After the Olympics, it was revealed that Liu and her father, a former political refugee, were also among those targeted in a spying operation that the Justice Department alleges was ordered by the Chinese government.
In her retirement announcement on Saturday, Liu said her skating career has been filled with “a lot of good and a lot of bad but (you know) that’s just how it is.”
“I’ve made so many friends, and so so sooo many good memories that i’ll have for the rest of my life,” she wrote. “(Right now) i’m probably just gonna spend all my spare time with my family and friends; and i’m also going to study.”
Contributing: Analis Bailey, Associated Press
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