This is part of Slate’s 2026 Olympics coverage. Read more here.
“That’s what I’m fucking talking about! Yeah!”
So said U.S. figure skater Alysa Liu, directly into a television camera, upon finishing her gold medal–winning routine in Milan on Thursday. The 20-year-old from Oakland, making a triumphant return after stepping away from the sport because she had lost the joy in it, celebrated her near-flawless performance with a level of profanity and swagger more typical of a skate park than of an ice rink.
It was a fitting moment for these Olympic Games, which have seen Team USA’s two best women’s singles skaters create a new blueprint for what a champion figure skater can look and sound like. Liu and 26-year-old Amber Glenn, who came in fifth after a dazzling performance on Thursday, are part of a trio of skaters who have dubbed themselves the “Blade Angels,” a moniker chosen as a symbol of unity and friendship. It’s a spot-on encapsulation of the contradictory expectations figure skaters have to navigate. The blade part evokes the cutthroat competition of the Games and the brute strength required to propel yourself around and above the ice, while angels plays on the gentle, sweetly feminine aesthetic that has long defined the sport for women.
Liu and Glenn represent a stark departure from that norm. Glenn, the first openly queer woman to skate in women’s singles at the Olympics, has cultivated an outspoken political streak. Liu flaunts a goth-teen dye job and a frenulum piercing she gave herself that pops out when she smiles. Together, they are sounding the death knell for a stereotype that has dominated global figure skating for generations: the ice princess.
Because figure skating combines feats of athleticism with the artistic flourishes of dance, the sport’s judges have quite a bit of leeway in how they score competitors. Historically, they’ve favored skaters who embody grace over power, and they’ve been unkind to athletes who deviate from white standards of beauty. Surya Bonaly, a Black skater from France, won over a generation of fans in the ’90s with her finesse, fortitude, and one-legged backflip. But Bonaly was painted as an outsider and famously underrated because, as a former U.S. Olympic coach said in the documentary Rebel on Ice, “she didn’t look like the ice princess.”
While the model of female superstardom has evolved in other sports thanks to athletes like the Williams sisters, Megan Rapinoe, and Chloe Kim, figure skating has remained mired in old-fashioned rules and gender norms. It wasn’t until 2015 that skaters could choose songs with lyrics. Men still cannot wear tights in competition; trousers are mandatory.
ESPN columnist Johnette Howard wrote in 2015 that women figure skaters had “traditionally been allowed only two sanctioned personas over the years—chaste and elegant, like the great [Peggy] Fleming, or perky and cute as a button, like [Dorothy] Hamill.” When Howard wrote that piece, it seemed like a huge deal to her that American Ashley Wagner had gone so far as to call herself a “vicious competitor” ready to “take these other girls down”—a simple description of what every elite athlete aims to do.
Compare that to the TikTok slideshow posted by Glenn last week in the wake of her gold-medal win, with Liu, in the team event. Over the Famous Dex song “Hoes Mad,” Glenn wrote, “They hate to see two woke bitches winning.”
Glenn was responding to the backlash—what she described as “a scary amount of hate”—that she’d received for speaking out against the anti-LGBTQ+ movement in the U.S. Her post made clear that she is not going to stop talking about her community or her values. Rather, she’s ready to make political provocation an integral part of her public persona.
Liu, meanwhile, may be the first Olympic figure skater who could get a job at Hot Topic. It’s no wonder that someone who derives such clear joy from self-expression chose to retire from the sport at 16 years old. She told 60 Minutes that back then, everything about her life and career was dictated by her father and coaches, from her diet and training schedule to her music choices. When she decided to come back to skating after a two-year hiatus, it was under the condition that she be allowed to control those things herself.
The result has been an exuberant and almost eerily relaxed run to the gold in Milan. Liu and the lovably un-chill Glenn take very different approaches to their sport, but both seem determined to be a new kind of skating icon, about as far from the perfectly packaged, prim and proper sweetheart as they could be.
Ironically, in their individuality, they may be making room for all kinds of other skaters to stand out—even the normies. The third Blade Angel, 18-year-old Isabeau Levito, is, as Chris Schleicher wrote in Slate, “the ice princess you’d order from the catalog.” Next to Glenn and Liu, she looks positively unique.
The close friendship Liu and Glenn have formed has endeared them to American viewers, who appear ready to root for skaters who seem imperfect and idiosyncratic. In another context, the bottle blonde from Texas and the Bay Area alt kid wouldn’t seem like obvious besties. But through their shared love of the sport—and their shared experience of butting up against its strictures—they’re helping each other carve out space for themselves in the figure skating world. Charting a new future for a notoriously slow-to-change sport can’t be easy. Luckily, neither Liu nor Glenn has to do it alone.