Alysa in Milan

MacArthur Park is a stunning surprise.

In her gold dress, she does her triple lutz-triple toe, her double axel, her hair flip, her level 4 spins. I see her MacArthur Park free skate for the fourth or fifth time, but it is better than it ever was before. She is twenty years old, proud to be Alysa Liu, and she has grown into her personal best in Milan.

She is one of the Blade Angels, the trio of three American singles figure skaters in Milan. I love Isabeau Levito, whose grandmother is from Italy, even though Sophia Loren is not a personal favorite of mine-because her elegance has just the right touch of personality, and her off-ice humor just highlights that. I love Amber Glenn, who realizes that now is not a time to be silent about politics, whose fifth-place finish was a triumph; she has always struggled at Worlds, and fifth at the Olympics might as well be a gold medal for her. Plus, she did her triple axel in both her programs, even though she had been struggling with it in practice, and that's really something, for someone who was known to struggle under pressure. With the team event, she even has a gold medal of her own, and Alysa has two!

Ilia Malinin will come back at Worlds next month to be his normal self, and hopefully the Olympics-only fans will tune in then and see what he's been showing figure skating fans for years - the real unique move he had, the impossibly difficult quad axel. I'm not a fan of pushing ultra-challenging elements on young skaters, as the Russian skating mill has been known to do, but the disinformation in the news about his special move being the backflip is taking the easy way out of news - talking about something the public already knows about rather than taking the time to delve into something they still didn't see.

Seeing them all together, the Blade Angels and the other competitors, has me on the edge of my seat, wondering what my own next steps will be, as a rabid figure skating fan. Personally, I sometimes have wondered what it would be like to skate again. I haven't skated since I was in my late 20s, and fell and got eight stitches in my chin, leaving a large pool of blood on the ice. My left foot is pronated, but sometimes I dream about what it would be like to get special skates to correct it, or surgery to correct it.

I find myself coming to my keyboard to express myself in writing, because I was an English major after all, and never was particularly good with eye-hand coordination. It's here that I want to finesse my moves, maybe by trying to learn to coordinate my writing better, and to learn more about the subjects I write about. I have studied figure skating jumps and programs over and over while commentary has played in the background, wanting to understand more of what I have such strong feelings about.

Traveling to Milan has left me exhausted but thrilled, and the image of Alysa smiling with her gold and black hair and her navy blue exhibition dress lives in my mind on the flight home.

Author's note: Although I have sometimes gone to figure skating competitions as an audience member, I was not actually in Milan. This story was written in response to a prompt for a daily contest, to write about a memorable experience at the Milan Olympics:

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The Writer's Cramp  (13+) Write the best story or poem in 24 hours or less and win 10K GPS! #333655 by Sophy on the road

Link to Alysa's free skate from Milan: https://youtu.be/CVmCfiFjoVE