OAKLAND — The queen-in-waiting, Alysa Liu of Richmond, stands all of 4-foot-7, is prone to giggles and tends to hold court with figure skating’s elite.
Michelle Kwan’s coach popped out of retirement last week to work with Liu at Oakland Ice Center before an eagerly awaited senior-level debut at the U.S. championships Thursday through Sunday in Detroit.
Frank Carroll’s presence followed that of three-time Olympic medalist Sergei Ponomarenko, an ice dance coach from Morgan Hill who helped the girl with skating steps.
In May, Liu and her long-time coach Laura Lipetsky spent a week in Toronto to learn from Brian Orser, the 1984 and ‘88 silver medalist who has trained Olympic champions Yuna Kim and Yuzuru Hanyu.
The youngster also traveled to Japan to meet successful coaches there, fueling the question: Is this America’s next ice queen?
Liu has an adult-like perception when it comes to the anticipation of a skating community triple flipping out over the ability of this otherworldly 13-year-old.
“It’s not that stressful for me,” said Liu, one of 13 Bay Area skaters competing at the U.S. championships. “If someone says, ‘Oh, she is going to win,’ I don’t think about that. I just think, ‘OK, clean program.’”
The teen is soaring while staying grounded. Liu enters the championships with the most technically advanced program among the 18 competitors even though she is at least two years younger than the rest.
Liu plans to attempt three triple axel jumps over the course of her programs Thursday and Friday. A year ago, the skating community went wild over Mirai Nagasu landing one such 3 1/2-rotation jump that currently is atop the food chain among women’s skating maneuvers.
But three? It’s like having an iPhone in the flip phone era.
Of the 17 athletes going against Liu, it seems only Starr Andrews might include one axel in her program. Emphasis on the word might.
In August, Liu became the youngest skater in history to hit the coveted jump in international competition. She joined Tonya Harding, Kimmie Meissner and Nagasu as the only Americans to have successfully landed it.
Such feats have inspired Mariah Bell, one of the favorites with defending champion Bradie Tennell, to consider mastering the axel after the season.
But it might be asking too much for an athlete who is 22. Nagasu began learning the axel at 23 to ensure she would reach the 2018 Olympics. The two-time Olympian recently announced that she had pushed her body past its “own boundaries” and had undergone surgery in September. Nagasu, 25, won’t skate at the U.S. championships for the first time since 2006.
For those entertaining notions of learning the triple axel, get this: Liu attempted two quadruple jumps in the fall and will focus on landing four-rotation maneuvers after the U.S. championships.
Liu will have time to practice them. Even if she were to win in Detroit, the teen is too young to advance to the 2019 Junior World Championships because she turned 13 five weeks after the July 1 age cutoff.
It’s the reason Liu could not represent the United States last season despite winning the junior title in San Jose while dazzling hometown fans with six clean triple jumps in her free skate. The girl won’t be eligible to compete as an international senior until 2022, the year of the Beijing Games. By then, Liu could be a three-time U.S. medalist.
Or not. Who really knows?
“She’s a little firecracker” but “time will tell because she’s tiny right now,” said San Jose’s Polina Edmunds, a 2014 Olympian who also had superior technical skills at an early age. “We’re seeing a lot of other skaters from other countries attempting these huge triple axels and quads. But they are all so young and there hasn’t been time to see how it plays out in the future.”
The jumps often become more difficult to execute with growth spurts but the overall performance can ripen into a thing of beauty.
“Maybe the program of someone of my age or maybe of my experience is going to be told in a different way than somebody who is 12 or 13,” said Bell, who has placed 12th at the past two World Championships.
Liu doesn’t sound 13 when confronting the question.
“I know a lot of people think I’m all about the jumps,” she said. “I do try to work on skating skills. Because I am so small it is a bit harder to project that emotion and presentation.”
Liu selected music this season to emphasize her youth: Barbra Streisand’s “Don’t Rain on My Parade” for the 2½-minute short program and John William’s “The Witches of Eastwick” for the 4-plus-minute free skate.
But all anyone can talk about are those eye-popping triple axels as she enters the national stage with the kind of anticipation that was reserved for a 13-year-old Kwan at the 1994 championships in Detroit.
Listen to three-time U.S. champion Ashley Wagner in an interview with NBC Sports: “If you’re not even thinking about a triple axel, then maybe you should step aside.”
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Liu is emerging just as U.S. women’s figure skating slips into irrelevancy. The Americans had their worst Olympic showing since 1944 last year at the Pyeongchang Games when Tennell (ninth), Nagasu (10th) and Fremont’s Karen Chen (11th) had costly falls.
Only Russians and Japanese performers qualified for the Grand Prix final last month. Five of the six Junior Grand Prix finalists were Russians, with one South Korean.
No American has filled the void left by 2014 Olympians Gracie Gold, Edmunds and Wagner, and Nagasu.
Chen, the 2017 U.S. champion, withdrew from this year’s nationals because of lingering foot injuries.
Gold also withdrew this month after an aborted comeback. She missed the ’18 season while undergoing treatment for depression, anxiety and an eating disorder. Edmunds, a Santa Clara University junior, has been sidelined by a three-year-old foot injury.
Expectations are skyrocketing for Liu to become that transcendent star for starved American fans. U.S. Figure Skating officials took Liu and her coach to Vancouver last month to watch the Grand Prix final so the girl could experience the scene they expect her to enter in the coming year.
Father Arthur Liu praised U.S. officials for their foresight. His mission is to give Alysa every opportunity to succeed.
It has not been easy as a single father of five children who were born to two surrogate mothers through anonymous egg donors. Besides Alysa, there is a 10-year-old girl and 9-year-old triplets.
Arthur Liu also has a busy Oakland law practice a few blocks from the ice rink. Alysa is homeschooled through Connections Academy because of her demanding schedule. The ninth grader does her schoolwork at the rink between morning and afternoon training sessions.
Arthur Liu isn’t worried about his daughter’s skating or school.
“My biggest job is to make sure that she doesn’t listen to what other people are posting on the internet,” he recently said at the rink.
Liu told his daughter to ignore all postings. He’s had to order Alysa’s friends to stop sending them to her as well.
“That’s the biggest challenge for every parent in the internet age,” the father said.
Liu differentiates between personal attacks and constructive criticism. It’s why he is open to letting other coaches help Lipetsky, a former national-level skater who graduated from Cal and has trained Alysa since she was 5½.
For example, Phillip DeGuglielmo of San Francisco has been the “harness coach” who teaches the girl difficult jumps while attached to a device that prevents bone-breaking falls. Arthur Liu said Lipetsky arranges outside coaching sessions.
“If we want to train her to be a national champion, a world champion or an Olympic champion we have to provide her with the best training staff,” he said.
Liu, 54, immigrated to the United States at age 25. His family has remained in Chongqing in southwest China although his mother came to help when the kids were younger.
Now a friend helps Liu by picking up the other children after school, feeding them and getting them to sleep. The lawyer requests court appearances around Alysa’s competition and camp schedule although it’s going to get more complicated as the girl becomes eligible for the Junior Grand Prix season next fall. If all goes as expected Alysa will earn two international assignments as well as be eligible for other trips.
Another wrinkle is U.S. Figure Skating’s new guidelines prohibiting minors from being with a coach without at least one more adult present. Liu no longer can let his daughter attend a camp or competition with Lipetsky, who has become a trusted family friend.
“Now it is me or I have to send somebody,” Liu said of trips and private practices.
He and Alysa have been on this path since the girl fell in love with skating the first time she tried it. Alysa has qualified for the U.S. championships every year since 2016 when becoming the youngest intermediate champion in history at age 10.
The teen knows the names of all the top Americans she will face in Detroit but isn’t intimidated by the stage.
“I mean, yeah, they’re good,” she said. “It’s kind of weird to say, I just think about program, program, program.”
Hold on to the tiaras. A new queen is rising.