milano ice skating arena

MILAN — She flipped her hair. She shrugged. She dusted her hands off.

Alysa Liu makes winning an Olympic gold medal look easy.

The 20-year-old became the first U.S. woman to win the Olympic singles title since 2002, electrifying the crowd at Milano Ice Skating Arena with her “MacArthur Park” program Thursday and overtaking Japanese rivals Kaori Sakamoto and Ami Nakai, who won second and third, respectively.

Liu scored a monster 150.20 points in her free skate, the highest mark for a women’s free skate all season in international competition to win by a total of 1.89 points. Her choreographer Massimo Scali’s jaw dropped when he heard the score read in Italian. A beat later when the screen caught up to the public address announcement in the stadium, Liu nodded confidently and cracked a subtle smirk.

American gold medalist Alysa Liu hugs Japanese bronze medalist Ami Nakai after their final scores were revealed at the Winter Olympics on Thursday in Milan.

(Jamie Squire / Getty Images)

She doesn’t care about the scores.

Liu, who grew up in Oakland, has floated through her second Olympics as if she had not a single care in the world. A two-year retirement during which she climbed Mt. Everest, got her driver’s license and started college at UCLA made skating feel inconsequential. Now so unbothered, Liu spent part of her six-minute warmup cheering on teammate Amber Glenn in the leader’s chair. Minutes before taking the ice, Liu snapped a selfie with her coaches. She gives her coaches a high-five right before taking her starting position.

“She’s not like us,” her coach Phillip Diguglielmo said. “The rest of us here would be like, ‘Oh my God, I’m nervous. Oh, I can’t do this. I have a million voices in my head.’ She has one voice in her head, and it says, ‘I got this.’”

The only emotions Liu felt during her program were “calm, happy and confident.” When she sees the faces in the crowd smile, Liu said she can’t help but smile, too. And there was a lot of smiling. Her Donna Summer disco program had fans clapping within the first minute. Diguglielmo and Scali held their hands overhead to join the roar. Liu’s pre-program message to the crowd on the video board was “Y’all better turn up!”

Liu, who won the 2025 world championship with the same crowd-pleasing program, returned to the sport in 2024 with the sole objective of sharing her art. She wanted to make as many programs as possible. Winning never seemed to matter. With the gold medal hanging around her neck, Liu stopped short of saying she even wanted it. She surely didn’t need it, she said.

“What I needed was the stage,” Liu said. “And I got that.”

Once Liu processed the final scores, she rose to her feet and turned toward Nakai, clapping for the 17-year-old. Nakai, skating in her first Olympics, was shocked. She held up three fingers to Liu, asking if she had finished on the podium. Overjoyed, they hugged. Liu picked Nakai, who had entered the free skate in first place, up off the ground.

Sakamoto was less than a point ahead of Liu entering Thursday’s free skate, but small mistakes from the three-time world champion, in addition to Liu’s strong technique and infectious energy made Liu the first U.S. woman to win the Olympic gold medal since Sarah Hughes in 2002. The United States’ 20-year drought without a medal — since Sasha Cohen took silver in 2006 — was the country’s longest.

Liu held her palms up in disbelief after finishing the program of her life that put her in the lead with two competitors remaining. She leaned into the camera and pointed to the piercing on the inside of her upper lip. She did it herself.

With blond horizontal stripes dyed in her dark brown hair, bold black eyeliner and the smiley lip piercing, Liu has cut an alternative path to the top of a sport that long valued a specific kind of femininity. But the slick back bun, classical music and balletic dress was not Liu’s brand.

Her brand is joy.

And now as just the second figure skater in history to win two Olympic gold medals at the same Olympic Games — joining U.S. star Nathan Chen — Liu has the stage, and the attention, to display her joy for the next generation of athletes.

“People will be able to see how she approaches the sport now versus before and see how much more successful it is now in a healthy way,” Glenn said. “And I’m hoping people can really learn from that.”

Glenn got redemption after the short program, putting up a season’s best 147.52 during her free skate that vaulted her from 13th to fifth with a 214.91 total score. The only blemish was when Glenn put one hand down on her final jump — the same triple loop that cost her in her short program. But as she held one leg behind her during a spiral in her last sequence, Glenn smiled as she looked into the crowd. After the program, she whipped her fist through the air triumphantly.

The performance put a positive punctuation mark on Glenn’s winding Olympic journey. She has faced intense scrutiny at the Games. The same pressure that consumed Glenn and teammate Ilia Malinin could not even touch Liu’s glowing aura.

When asked Thursday if she felt any “Olympic pressure,” Liu smiled.

“You would have to explain what Olympic pressure is,” she said.

Then she bounced away, the gold medal around her neck blending perfectly with her gold dress.

MILAN — Believe in the Quad God.

Ilia Malinin’s clutch free skate that scored 200.03 points gave the United States its second consecutive team figure skating gold medal Sunday at the Milan-Cortina Olympic Games.

After Amber Glenn fought through a shaky free program that finished third and lost the United States its two-point lead, Malinin stepped up as only he could. He executed five quad jumps and won by nearly six points, even if he did not perform his signature quad axel. He even put his hand down after a jump, but the mistake only seemed to fuel him as he finished with a flourish, changing the back-half of his program to earn back extra points.

His U.S. teammates, cheering from the sideline box rose to their feet and pumped their fists after each of Malinin’s jumping passes. When he landed his back flip, skating flawlessly through one foot, the packed crowd at Milano Ice Skating Arena roared.

While Japan’s Shun Sato scored a season’s best to finish the competition, he could not match the technical prowess of Malinin, who is also the favorite to win individual gold this week.

In front of a raucous home crowd, Italy held off Georgia for the bronze medal behind a dazzling free skate from Matteo Rizzo, who dropped to his knees on the ice and cried after his performance had fans chanting “Italia!” before he even finished. He cried into the Italian flag in the kiss-and-cry after his season’s best 179.62 points.

With the first figure skating medal of the Milan-Cortina Games on the line, every skater fought for every fraction of a point. U.S. pairs skater Ellie Kam went deep into a one-legged squat to hold on to the first throw jump. The United States led by five points entering the final day, but still had no room for error as Japan finished first in qualifying in all of Sunday’s disciplines. With the dominance of Japan’s Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara in pairs, Kam’s partner Danny O’Shea knew the strategy for the U.S. pair was to simply try to stay as close as possible.

Ellie Kam and Danny O’Shea perform in pairs figure skating during the team competition at the Milan-Cortina Games on Sunday.

(Stephanie Scarbrough / Associated Press)

Kam fought for the landing on a throw loop so hard that she could feel her leg cramping.

“I was like, ‘I’m not going down,’” Kam said, “I got this. We got this.”

They looked at each other before their next element and said “calm.” Their message cut through the energized crowd that cheered louder and louder with each jump. At the end, Kam’s and O’Shea’s celebratory screams simply joined the crowd’s roar. As they saluted the crowd, O’Shea pointed toward Kam to acknowledge her effort.

The pair’s fourth-place finish in the free program was a one-point improvement from their qualifying spot, earning a slim, but vital cushion entering the men’s and women’s free skates.

Instead of sending world champion Alysa Liu back for the free skate after she performed the short program, the U.S. selected the three-time national champion Glenn. The 26-year-old was making her Olympic debut.

On the Olympic stage for the first time, Glenn has tried to embrace the opportunity while treating the competition as if it were any other one. But the larger stage has created additional stress for Glenn after she was asked in a news conference about President Trump’s approach to the LGBTQ+ community in recent years and how it’s affected her personally.

U.S. figure skater Amber Glenn competes during the team competition on Sunday at the Milan-Cortina Games.

(Ashley Landis / Associated Press)

Glenn, who identifies as bisexual and pansexual, encouraged people in the queer community to “stay strong in these hard times” and recognized that it wasn’t the first time the community had to unite to “fight for our human rights.” Glenn then received threats on social media after the news conference and posted on Instagram that she would be taking a break from social platforms to focus on the competition.

But it wasn’t the social media hate that rattled Glenn, she insisted. She was simply tired, sore and disoriented from the unfamiliar Olympic team competition format.

All of Glenn’s other competitors did the short program portion of the competition on Friday. She came in with several good days of training at the venue, but did not get the same kind of opportunity to get used to the stage. Glenn fought through a shaky triple axel to open her program and stepped out of a triple flip that prevented her from completing a planned combination for her second jumping pass.

Waiting in the kiss-and-cry, Glenn bowed her head and stared at the ground. She struggled to muster even a fake smile.

“I’m grateful that the team is so supportive.” said Glenn, who finished behind Japan’s Kaori Sakamoto and Italy’s Lara Naki Gutmann. “But I do feel guilty that I could be the reason that we don’t win the gold, and I don’t know how I will ever apologize for that.”

Glenn clasped her hands in her lap waiting for Sato’s score after the Japanese skater performed a clean program that had his teammates in tears. But his technical score was about five points less than Malinin’s. Glenn was the first skater to hug Malinin in the United States’ team celebration, lifting him off the ground as he extended arms out wide.