Alysa Liu (born 8 August 2005) is an American figure skater who competes in the ladies singles discipline. She is the 2019 U.S. national champion, the 2018 U.S. junior champion, and the 2016 U.S. intermediate champion. Liu was born on 8 August 2005, in Clovis, California, the oldest child of Arthur Liu, an attorney who immigrated to the U.S. from the Sichuan Province in southwestern China in the 1990s. Like her four siblings, she was conceived through an egg donor and a surrogate mother. She attended Chinese school for three years, then attended the Oakland School for the Arts, which offers an emphasis in figure skating. When she started missing too much school due to traveling to competitions, she began homeschooling at her father's law office in between practices. She used the same online program that other skaters, including fellow Bay Area skaters Karen Chen and Vincent Zhou, have used.
In August 2018, Liu competed as a novice at the 2018 Asian Open Trophy in Bangkok, Thailand. She won the gold, outscoring the silver medalist, Japan's Sara Honda, by over ten points.[15] She landed a ratified 3A in the free skate, becoming the youngest skater in history to perform a clean triple Axel in an international competition and the third American female to do so, following Tonya Harding and Mirai Nagasu. Although Liu is too young to compete internationally at the senior, or even junior, level, she qualified to compete in the senior ranks at the 2019 U.S. Championships in Detroit, Michigan.[17] On January 25, 2019, she became the youngest skater in history to win the U.S. senior ladies' title, after placing second in the short to defending U.S. champion Bradie Tennell with a record score (which was broken minutes later by Tennell), and first in the free with a clean program including a 3A-2T, 3A, 3Lz-3T, and 3Lz-1Eu-3S.
