MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Can we please keep talking about the gold medal performance of figure skater Alysa Liu at the Olympics yesterday? The California native, reigning world champion, earned the first Olympic medal for the U.S. in women's single skating since 2006 - so 20 years, people. But it was how she did it that has got us all talking. Chris Schleicher has been covering Olympic figure skating for Slate. He is himself a former figure skater. Chris, welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
CHRIS SCHLEICHER: Thanks for having me.
KELLY: So I saw where you wrote, thank you, Alysa Liu, for making figure skating a joy to watch again. Talk about that. Why joy?
SCHLEICHER: There's something so special about Alysa Liu and her skating that I have not seen in maybe decades, in that she seems to be skating from a pure place of joy and not fear. And I can totally relate to the fear-based side of the sport. The stakes are so high. You're performing for a panel of judges who are going to mark down everything wrong you do. And one misstep, as we saw from Amber Glenn in the short program, can mean the end of your Olympic dream.
KELLY: Yeah. One tiny toe touch that goes wrong, and you're on the ice, and it's over.
SCHLEICHER: And that is years of training and money and everything. And if you let that get into your head, it can completely make you skate not to lose, rather than skate to win. And it's like she has a completely different brain, that she talks about having no nerves at all at the Olympics and, like, enjoying the pressure and just getting out there to show people her art. And it's this level of mental health that I haven't seen in so long in the sport, and it's so refreshing.
KELLY: You had one other line in your writing on this. Allow me to keep quoting your writing at you. You wrote, she's the first skater in years to remember that the inherent quality of ice is that it slides, and she should lean into its flowy nature by relaxing fully.
SCHLEICHER: Yeah. I mean, and even the commentators - Tara Lipinski was talking about that relaxed nature helps her jumps be bigger and helps her landings be more beautiful and then get extra grade of execution points. It's both, like, healthy and joyful or whatever but actually kind of good strategy. And even her music choice - she did Donna Summer "MacArthur Park" for her long program, which got the audience, like, ready to roar and root for her. And there's - usually people choose these very beautiful ballads and classical pieces. And this was, like, just a party on the ice in a way that was, like, what about my own way?
KELLY: Yeah. That's such a great point about bringing the crowd into it through music choice, through the way she was moving. I was interviewing my NPR colleague Rachel Treisman, who is in Milan covering the games. I talked to her last night right after Liu won gold. And she said it was as though Liu had cast this happy spell over the whole crowd. Everybody was clapping. Everybody was cheering until, by the end, everyone was on their feet, like, feeding off her energy. And she, it sounds like, was feeding off theirs.
SCHLEICHER: Yeah. It's almost like she's found this to be her secret weapon, when - I call this, like, Alysa 2.0. She famously said she was retiring from the sport and came back just for fun. I'm going to come back and see what I can do. She won the World Championships, now has won the Olympics. But Alysa 1.0 could do a triple axel and could do a quadruple jump. She said, I'm not doing that anymore. It's too hard on my body. I'm going to come back and do my triples beautifully and skate with this joy, and that was enough to win. And the previous version that was going for all this really rigorous, hard-on-your-body stuff, like, wasn't the version that won. And that's, like, kind of a beautiful lesson.
KELLY: Yeah. She famously has said all through this, hey, I'm not in it for a medal. I'm just here to have fun. Is that the key? I mean, for her, obviously, to win. But, like, for all of us, for life, stop worrying about all these achievement yardsticks that we are constantly always measuring ourselves by. Just go out and have some fun.
SCHLEICHER: I think, yeah. And it's healthy for so many skaters in the sport. Like, every four years, we're only going to send three women to the Olympics. Does that mean that every other girl skating out there is somehow a failure? Shoot for that Olympic goal, but have other measures of success that are healthier and achievable, and you might actually end up getting those along the way. It's really so refreshing to see someone reframe what success in the sport looks like.
KELLY: Chris Schleicher - you can check out his writing about Olympics figure skating on the Slate website. Chris Schleicher, thank you.
SCHLEICHER: Thank you so much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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