Alexandra Trusova: JGP Final Champion

For a long time, no U.S. Winter Olympians possessed the cultural cachet the women’s skaters did. After winning the gold medal in 1968 at Grenoble, Peggy Fleming taped five TV specials for NBC; Michelle Kwan, who earned a silver and a bronze in two Games (alongside five world championship golds), captured not one but two Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards. Marrying glamour with precision and grace with dominance, America’s skaters captured the nation’s hearts, every four years, for half a century. But Alysa Liu cannot recall that time: No U.S. woman has won an individual Olympic medal since Sasha Cohen took silver in 2006, when Liu was an infant. American women have medaled only once in the last 13 world championships, and at the PyeongChang Games in 2018, they finished ninth, 10th and 11th, one of the team’s worst-ever showings.




U.S. Figure Skating can trace its struggles to the International Skating Union’s implementation of new judging standards in 2004. After a scandal in pairs judging at Salt Lake City, the ISU wanted to make scoring more transparent. Instead of one overall mark for technical merit, skaters were now rewarded for each difficult element in their programs. What this meant was that any skater who could consistently nail difficult elements would triumph; less was left to chance. But U.S. Figure Skating did not implement bonuses for difficult jumps at the juvenile through novice levels until 2015—by which point it was too late. American women watched the quad revolution from afar. Says Tara Lipinski, the 1998 Olympic gold medalist and, until Liu, the youngest American national champ, “In Russia there are teenagers doing multiple quads. There was a stagnant period, where you did a triple-triple [combination], and that’s all you needed. Now the roof has blown off.”



In Detroit, Liu landed three clean triple Axels, the triple jump with the highest degree of difficulty because the forward takeoff and backward landing make it 3½ rotations. She had landed her first at the Asian Open as a 12-year-old, making her the youngest ever to do it; none of her competitors in Detroit attempted even one. Says Bell, the bronze medalist, “When you’re 13, it is so exciting to go out there and show everything you’ve got. As you get older, you’re have a different mind-set, like, O.K., I have this and this to lose. She just goes out there to take it all.” Bell worked on a triple Axel briefly last summer; now, because of Liu, she’s even more motivated to add that jump. “Younger girls [thought] we shouldn’t go for [triple Axels], let’s just stick to what these [older] girls are doing,” Bell says. “Alysa went above and beyond that, and it opens a new door and helps the U.S. in comparison to other countries where there are girls doing quads at a very young age.”



While ISU rules bar skaters under 15 from senior-level international competition, Liu is still watching the world’s best. “Did you know [14-year-old Russian skater] Alexandra Trusova’s eyes are blue?” Liu says. “I always thought they were brown.” She is paying particular attention to the Russian skaters coached by Eteri Tutberidze (who previously trained the gold and silver medalists at PyeongChang), including Trusova, who is the first female to land a quad Lutz in international competition, and Anna Shcherbakova, 15, the first to land two quad Lutzes in a single program. Trusova and Shcherbakova will compete on the senior level this season and, barring growth spurts or injuries, should bring their quads with them. Liu is on another schedule, though she hopes to do the same in the 2021-22 season, which will culminate in the Beijing Olympics. Until then, undoubtedly, the U.S. and Russia will continue the warm and friendly relationship they’ve enjoyed for many years.