03-04-2026LEADERSHIP NOW

Alysa Liu’s gold medal comeback is a leadership lesson about joy, not grit

High performance isn’t built on endurance alone. It’s built on conditions that make joy possible.

[Source Photo: Andrzej Iwanczuk/NurPhoto/Getty Images]

Anyone who knows me knows I’m an optimistic, joy-seeking, recovering workaholic committed to leading a joyful rebellion against stress and burnout. So when friends started tagging me in posts about U.S. figure skater Alysa Liu’s joyful gold medal win at the Winter Olympics in Milan, I paid attention. Because this isn’t just a sports story. It’s a leadership story.

When Liu stepped away from competitive figure skating at the height of her career, it wasn’t because she lacked grit. It was because pushing harder was costing her joy. That choice runs against everything we tend to praise in high performers: Push through. Power through. Never quit.

In an interview with the Associated Press, Liu described a life reduced to repetition: living alone at the Olympic Training Center, shuttling between the dorm and the rink, being told when to train, what to eat—only to wake up and repeat it all over again the next day. There was little space for exploration or identity beyond the sport. Over time, she stopped caring about the details that once mattered—her music, her costumes, even her creative input. Others made those choices. The work became mechanical. Eventually, she began questioning not her talent, but her sense of self—wondering who she was outside a system that had defined her entirely by performance, saying: “I felt like a puppet other people were using.”

What Liu outlined is what happens when the conditions of performance become unsustainable. And she’s not the first young elite athlete to model this kind of leadership.

At the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, Simone Biles withdrew from multiple finals to protect her mental health and physical safety. At the time, the reaction was polarized. The cultural script told us she should power through. That winners don’t quit. That leaders don’t step back.

But Biles demonstrated something far more nuanced: situational awareness under extreme pressure. She recognized that her mind and body were not aligned, and she refused to risk catastrophic failure in the name of optics. What many labeled weakness was, in fact, disciplined self-leadership.

While both Biles and Liu disrupted the myth that high performance requires self-erasure, workplaces create similar conditions for their employees every day—just with Outlook calendars instead of Olympic routines.

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