As Alysa Liu nearly collapsed off the ice, in the seconds between completing the free skate of her life and finding out that it had made her world champion, amid her gasps of “What the hell?” and choreographer Massimo Scala’s yelps of “You did it!”, coach Phillip DiGuglielmo leaned in for a quiet question.
He did not ask Liu, 19, about the exhilarating triple lutz–double axel–double toe loop she hit in the second half of Friday’s program at Boston’s TD Garden that elicited a roar from the crowd and helped earn her a career-best 148.39 to vault her ahead of Kaori Sakamoto and Mone Chiba, both of Japan. He did not ask what it would mean to her to become the first U.S. woman to win the figure skating world championships since 2006, when she was eight months old. He did not ask about her extraordinary comeback story.
