Over the two seasons since Alysa Liu returned to figure skating, she has found happiness in performing for the audience rather than for the judges who decide what place she gets in competitions.

Because that audience for the 2026 Olympic short program included her four younger siblings, who had never been able to see their sister skate in either of the two phases of her career, Liu was even more overjoyed at the opportunity to perform for them.

She saw them, sitting with her father and her best friend, during the six-minute warmup that preceded her taking the ice as the first skater in the final group Tuesday night on Milan. She looked at them while heading into her double Axel jump and during her footwork sequence.

“I performed to the people and, like, they're right there, so I performed to them specifically,” Liu said. “It was a really cool moment.”

She was non-plussed by any thoughts that her attention shouldn’t have been wandering from what she was doing on the ice. She was just being Alysa 2.0, who appears to take pleasure in everything that happens because she is in charge of the updated version of herself.

What the audience saw was Liu giving a performance that had just one minor technical flaw and was full of the ever-increasing passion with which she has done this autobiographical short program to the Laufey song, “Promise.” The lyrics tell the story of a person who tries in vain to distance herself from an old relationship, as Liu had with figure skating.

She has used the program since her comeback, and it touches a nerve in a way that makes her cry every time it ends.

“I connected with my program (today) on another level compared to the rest of the season,” Liu said.

It brought her the highest score for the Laufey program, 76.59, in the 12 times she has done it during an international competition in the last two seasons. That put her third behind two Japanese women, Ami Nakai (78.71) and Kaori Sakamoto (77.23), heading into Thursday’s free skate final.

Isabeau Levito of the U.S. was eighth, clearly dismayed by her score (70.84) after making only two relatively small mistakes.

Amber Glenn, winner of the last three U.S. titles, opened with a brilliantly executed triple Axel but took herself out of contention later by doing only a double jump when a triple was required. Glenn got no points for that element and wound up in 13th place at 67.39.

Liu looks like the only one of the three with a real shot at a medal, which the U.S. has not won in Olympic women’s singles in 20 years. Being in that position would presumably increase the pressure on her, but it has become foolhardy to make any presumptions about Liu.

“I don't know exactly what it is, but I really don't feel like nervous or, like, I don't feel the pressure,” Liu said. “There's nothing like holding me down, holding me back. I invite it all in. So no matter what happens, like, it's a story. It's a story.”

It’s actually part of a story (what follows is an abridged version) in which the opening chapters saw Liu become, at age 13 in 2019, the youngest U.S. women’s champion in history. She won the title again in 2020, and then Covid hit, and she battled injuries that took away her history-making jumps, the quads and triple Axel.

Liu became fed up with continuing to follow what had been her father’s plan for her life, a plan that placed skating over everything else. Arthur Liu’s intentions were good, but his daughter wanted some agency, wanted to spend more time with friends and her siblings, wanted to be just another teenager.

She made it to the 2022 Olympics, finishing a solid sixth. She got through that season, which finished with a bronze medal at the World Championships, because she told herself it would be her last. She retired at 16 and went on to start college at UCLA and do things like hike to Mount Everest base camp.

And then came the new chapters, which began with her going on a ski trip during which she realized sports could be fun... and maybe skating could be fun, too.

She returned to her old coaches, Phillip DiGuglielmo and Massimo Scali, and was back in competition last season. And then, astonishingly, she won the 2025 world title with two commanding programs.

“The past four years have been crazy,” Liu said. “It’s insane.”

Yet Liu has been preternaturally calm as a competitor, perhaps because she now sees herself more as an artist using ice as her medium to express herself in movement and costumes and music and appearance, with her raccoon-striped hair and a frenulum piercing visible when she smiles, with is often.

“I'm just like, really, really happy, and this moment is really exciting, and I don't want it to, you know, end,” Liu said.

Consider this: Liu fell on the third jumping pass in her first event of her comeback, in September 2024. Since then, she has had 210 jumps over 143 jumping passes without a fall – a remarkable consistency, notwithstanding that many of those jumps got negative grades of execution.

“She has an incredible ability to feel all the aspects of the jump as it is happening,” DiGuglielmo said. “She can make technical adjustments and not be judgmental and let it bother her.

“She just is in the moment. Plus, she gets the pure enjoyment and satisfaction of landing a great jump.”

Her four jumps in this Olympic short program included a triple Lutz-triple loop combination, the most difficult (and valuable in terms of points) combination attempted by any of the 29 competitors. The landing of the loop was solid but fell slightly short of three rotations, bringing a penalty. It was still worth just .03 less than the highest-scored combination in the event.

“I thought she was amazing,” Scali said. “She was calm, she was focused, she was present.

“And I think that she's really embracing this experience 100%, enjoying every time on the ice and outside. And it's beautiful to see her so happy.”

Liu already has a gold medal from the team event, in which she skated the short program. She will be hard-pressed to hold off the redoubtable Sakamoto, a three-time world champion, in the free skate.

“Do you feel like you can beat the Japanese?” a journalist asked her after the short program.

“I don't think about stuff like that,” Liu said. “Whether I beat them or not is not my goal.  My goal is just to do my programs and share my story. And I don't need to be over or under anyone to do that.”

Philip Hersh, who has covered figure skating at 13 straight Olympics, is a special contributor to NBCOlympics.com.