Alysa Liu on “Insane” Training Rule

Alysa Liu isn’t skating around her experience as a young athlete.

The pro figure skater—who rose to fame after winning two gold medals at the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics—revealed that while training for the sport, she was encouraged to refrain from drinking water.

“They were like ‘Water weight, you shouldn’t drink water,’” Alysa told Rolling Stone in an interview published Mar. 7. “’You should gargle it.’ It’s crazy. It’s insane.”

In fact, Alysa’s grueling training experience is part of the reason she “hated skating” by age 14, ultimately leading to her brief retirement.

“I started to hate it because I thought that that’s where all my issues stemmed from,” she explained. “And so at 16 I quit.”

The 20-year-old also opened up about how the sport’s isolation during the Covid pandemic pushed her to take the four-year hiatus from the ice. 

“You’re 14, you’re not going to school,” she said, “you’re not seeing your friends, you’re training like working so hard for what? And I didn’t even know what I was doing it for anymore. It was all really difficult.”