Alysa Liu wins Grand Prix Final gold medal ahead of Olympics return

U.S. figure skating star Alysa Liu won gold at the Grand Prix Final in Japan on Saturday, earning her second international medal of 2025 ahead of her Olympic return in February.

Liu came out on top, beating Japan’s youth sensation Nakai Ami by less than two points.

“My performance definitely gives me confidence in terms of my endurance and consistency,” Liu said, according to Olympics.com. “I think a lot of things can happen between now and the Olympics. I still have my citizens, they still have their citizens, and I will continue to work.

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Liu returned to the sport last year after taking early retirement following her first Olympic performance in 2022. She was once considered a rising star, becoming the youngest-ever U.S. champion when she triumphed in 2019 at the age of 13 and retained the title the following year.

When she competed at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, she was overshadowed by the federal investigation into the Chinese espionage investigation into her and her father. Liu’s father had become a target of Chinese spies due to his involvement in the events in 1989. Tiananmen Square protests.

“Like, imagine learning this at such a young age, so in a weird way you’re like, ‘Am I like on a prank show?’ I thought. For example, is this world real? It’s like I should be a movie character. But I mean, everything my dad did in his activist days made sense to me,” Liu told Fox News Digital at the USOPC Media Summit in October.

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

Liu went on to compete at the Beijing Winter Games with enhanced security assurances from the State Department and USOPC. There were always at least two people accompanying him.

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

Liu decided Skating has become less enjoyable and it was more of a job and he wanted to focus on being a normal college student. It wasn’t until he went on a ski trip and felt the thrill of competition, albeit in a much different way and with much lower risks, that he started thinking about a return.

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

Later, after coming out of retirement in early 2024, Liu dethroned Japan’s Kaori Sakamoto, a three-time champion at the World Figure Skating Championships last March. She became the first American woman to receive this title since Kimmie Meissner in 2006.

Alysa Liu poses after winning the gold medal in the women’s program at the ISU Figure Skating Americas Grand Prix on November 16, 2025 at Herb Brooks Arena in Lake Placid, New York. (Jamie Squire/Getty Images)

Now he has his sights set on one of Team USA’s most dramatic stories: the Milan-Cortina Olympics in February.

He did not rule out adapting his life and experience in an international espionage case into a movie.

Still, he has some preferences about bringing his story to the big screen.

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“They have to make me look like this super cool hero. And I can’t be the kid who gets spied on and doesn’t do anything about it,” he said. “But honestly, I would like my main focus to be like my dad’s story, because his story is so cool and also just like everything that happened because of what he did, so I feel like we need to start from the roots.”

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