Alysa Liu isn’t shying away from discussing her experiences as a young athlete.
The professional figure skater—who gained recognition after winning two gold medals at the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics—shared that during her training, she was advised to avoid drinking water.
“They were like ‘Water weight, you shouldn’t drink water,’” Alysa told Rolling Stone in an interview published on Mar. 7. “’You should gargle it.’ It’s crazy. It’s insane.”
In fact, Alysa’s intense training experience contributed to her “hatred for skating” by the age of 14, which eventually led 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 discussed how the sport’s isolation during the Covid pandemic compelled her to take a four-year break from the ice.
“You’re 14, you’re not going to school,” she said, “you’re not seeing your friends, you’re training so hard for what? And I didn’t even know what I was doing it for anymore. It was all really difficult.”
