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A quarter-life crisis can come early for Olympic hopefuls.

Alysa Liu, figure-skating prodigy, needed to find both joy and autonomy before she could win a gold medal.

Competition can elbow out play.

Here is a question that invites an obvious answer: is play playful? Playfulness seems part and parcel of play.

But hang on. Call to mind sedentary, intensely engrossed grandmasters welded to their checkered boards at a tournament. They go off their feed. They sweat buckets. They lose ten pounds or more as they play their intricate, drawn-out mental game. Exhausted, stressed, win or lose, they withdraw after a match to a soak in warmed, bentonite clay, Slavic lullabies playing on the spa speakers.

In the electronic games universe, some of the multiplayer contests are so demanding in their detail, so complex in their character relations and retaliations, and so intwined with fantasy physics that need mastering, that high-level players will lose themselves in the contests that come to seem more work-like than play-like. It’s a second job, some will say, ruefully.

Or traditionally, consider golf. Some adepts will become poised during a round, entering a deep, rewarding, flowlike state. The force is with them. Not seldom in fact, though, everyday duffers will cuss at an off-fairway lie or sputter as they hack away once trapped in sand. Golf…

Finding the Playfulness in Play

Even among those who make a living at play, professionals in high-stakes games, though, playfulness will sometimes poke through. The Buffalo Bills number 17, quarterback Josh Allen who is playing a serious and dangerous game, is so happy at the prospect of a goal line that he will jump over an opposing linebacker. He’s big. He’s fast. He’s gleeful.

Or Muhammad Ali, who was a wiseacre even in the punishing ring— “is that all you got, Chump?”—was even more dismissive of reporters’ tendentious, tedious questioning. After joining the Nation of Islam, a Black nationalist religion, he took heat from the mainstream. Smirking reporters would ask about the prospect of multiple wives, theoretically permissible. Counterpunching, Ali would say he wanted four: one to shine his shoes, one to rub oil on his muscles, one to peel him grapes, and “one named Peaches.”

Or this episode: Casey Stengel, the longtime baseball manager famous for evasive, strategic gobbledygoop—“Stengelese”— replying bewilderingly to a Senator’s question in a Congressional antitrust hearing, asked “How could you transfer a ball club when you do not have a highway? How could you transfer a ball club when the railroads would take you to a town and you got off and then you had to wait and sit up five hours to go to another ball club?” Professional baseball, claiming their business was a natural monopoly for public benefit, had sought an exemption. Mickey Mantle, the Yankees slugger, followed Stengel on the stand. Senator Kefauver, the chair, asked him if he had any “observations with reference to the antitrust laws to baseball?” Mantle replied, “my views are about the same as Casey’s.”

Playfulness at Olympian Heights

This year’s Winter Olympic Games, dominated by the spirit of long dedication and sacrifice, grit in the teeth of nearby grievous injury, mastery of ice and snow and gravity-defying grace, has turned up an exception, a truly playful champion.

Alysa Liu, a figure skater of surpassing brilliance and joy, who took the gold medal in women’s singles figure skating at Cortina in 2026, was not always so apparently carefree.

Her career began at age 5 and a half when she began training with a choreographer. At age 13 she became the youngest women’s national title-holder and followed with similar victories a year later. She could routinely land triple and quadruple jumps and Axels, not long beforehand thought impossible (or unthinkable) for either men or women in an era when figure skating was “ice dancing” and seemingly more suited to a ballroom than a rink.

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Pursued by Spies and Pursuing Greatness

Urged on by her father, a political refugee from China’s People’s Republic, Liu racked up an impressive string of victories at regional, national, international, and world competitions. Her promise attracted the attention of the Chinese government under provisions of its “right of blood” laws which can consider the children of migrants’ Chinese citizens, despite their place of birth, in this case, the United States.

Chinese spies targeted her father Arthur Liu for his human rights views seeking leverage to recruit Alysa for their “naturalization project” that meant to intimidate foreign born athletes of Chinese ancestry into representing China in the 2022 Beijing Olympics. Instead, she competed for the U.S. team, and placed 8th in the women’s short program, an impressive Olympic debut.

But after fifteen years of training regimen, Alyssa Liu had had it. A team of coaches, parents, media consultants, costume designers, nutritionists, and sports psychologists had told her how to train, what to say, what to wear, what to eat, and how to feel. When they said jump, she asked how high.

“Skating takes up your whole life, almost,” she wrote on Instagram. Competition had elbowed out the pleasure she might have taken in mastery. Goals fulfilled, bored, weary of micromanagement, feeling restless and worn out, her life had been “a blur” she said.

Liu’s trajectory fits so perfectly the course of the classic hero’s journey, challenge, separation, rumination, and return that it might have been scripted by screenwriters. In a quest to find an authentic, joyful self, she emerged from psychological exile transformed.

Reshuffling her staff, distancing herself from her father’s coaching, determined to train her own way, crafting a new exuberant style, she took her career in hand.

For its aspiring stars the sport had cultivated the looks of princesses, dazzling but prim despite their athleticism, their gazes distant, preoccupied. The new Liu reappeared with a bit of grunge, hair striped playfully like a Disney meerkat, ponytail twirling, the outward sign of inward glee.

When she took the ice in a stellar gold-medal comeback, making the unthinkable look easy, Liu was smiling.

Michael Murphy, The Kingdom of Shivas Iron (1972); Adam Berenbak, “Play-by-Play on Baseball,” National Archives, Prologue Magazine, (Summer 2011); “Alysa Liu Announces Coaching Change,” National Figure Skating, (July 22, 2020); Caroline Beaton, “Why Millennials Need Quarter-Life Crises,” Psychology Today (September 12, 2017).

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