SAN JOSE — American figure skating got a peek at its future Sunday night and she’s only 12-years old.
Richmond’s Alysa Liu dazzled the judges and the audience at Solar4America Ice in San Jose to win the short program in the women’s junior division at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships.
Liu, who trains at Oakland Ice Center under Laura Lipetsky, scored an impressive 63.83 points after flawlessly completing three triple jumps and a double axel in a program set to flamenco music.
“We have a set goal — and I met it,” said Liu, who has a seven-point lead heading into the free skate.
Boy, did she, starting with lively footwork and spins before landing her double Axel.
After Liu executed a triple flip-triple toe in combination someone in the audience burst out, “Wow!”
Liu was nervous as the first skater to perform in front of a hometown crowd. But the youngest skater in the event told herself to “focus, focus, focus, I just kept telling myself to focus.”
Lily Sun of Foster City wasn’t as fortunate with a couple falls to place ninth out of 12 skaters.
The winner of the junior women’s competition has included Olympians Polina Edmunds, Gracie Gold and Mirai Nagasu. Three-time U.S. champion Ashley Wagner, favored to make her second Olympic team next week, was third in 2007. Bradie Tennell, another potential 2018 Olympian, won it three years ago.
So U.S. skating officials spent New Year’s Eve closely following the athletes because they have invested their hopes in the next generation of young women.
They want to end an international medal drought that is expected to continue next month at the Pyeongchang Games in South Korea.
Whoever makes the Olympic team is not expected to medal, particularly if all the top Russian skaters are declared eligible to compete as independents after the country was punished for a government-sponsored drug program.
The last American woman to win an Olympic medal in singles is Sasha Cohen, the silver medalist in 2006 in Turin, Italy. During that span, only Wagner has won a medal at the World Championships, which are held annually.
Liu and her fellow competitors are the first group of youngsters skating under a new points system that encourages them to keep up with the world’s best.
Liu, for example, does all her triple jumps in the second-half of her free skate to gain 10 percent bonus points for completing the most difficult elements while fatigued.
Justin Dillion, U.S. Figure Skating’s high performance director, is encouraged by the results so far. He said they are seeing incredible potential among the junior women.
Dillion is emphasizing sound technique because “you can’t train for triple axels and quadruples if you’re injured.”
Dillion also has been working with coaches of lower-level skaters to help them maintain conditioning and nutrition as they go through growth spurts.
“They think they’re immortal,” said Dillion, who was a long-time Bay Area coach who knew Liu when she started.
In the junior pairs short program, Fremont’s Sarah Feng of Fremont and TJ Nyman of Florida finished third with a strong performance that had one mistake when Feng spun out of a throw. Juliette Erickson of San Jose and Nathan Grundhofer of Fremont were last in the 13-pairs event.
Feng, 18, was a singles skater a year ago. But U.S. officials asked her to try out with Nyman, who had moved to pairs skating because, as he put it, “I’m a big guy.”
