ALYSA LIU GAINS 4M INSTAGRAM FOLLOWERS IN 2 WEEKS

Alysa Liu entered Milano Cortina as a skater with 210,000 Instagram followers. She left as a cultural phenomenon with 4.3 million. That is not a sports story. That is a media inflection point. The numbers move fast enough to dizzy. On February 9, the day Team USA won team gold, Liu gained 63,806 followers in 24 hours. By February 18, she had crossed 1 million. By the time her individual gold medal performance finished on February 19, she had accumulated 700,000 new followers in a single week. The math here is almost obscene: she was gaining followers at a rate of roughly 100,000 per day at peak velocity. Even Complex magazine, a brand that commands 11 million followers of its own, stopped to genuflect. Their post on Liu's explosion read simply: "almost 4M new IG followers while in Italy, and still I'm the biggest fan." There is something worth parsing in that moment. Legacy media does not often publicly acknowledge when an individual athlete outpaces its own gravitational pull. Liu forced them to. The performance that triggered this belonged to a skater who had no business being there. Liu retired from competitive figure skating at 16, walked away from the sport entirely, became a UCLA student with a normal life. Then something shifted. In March 2024, she announced a comeback. Eleven months later, she was standing on the Milano ice delivering what may be the most consequential free skate in American women's figure skating since Sarah Hughes in 2002. Her program to Donna Summer's "MacArthur Park" scored 150.20 in the free portion and 226.79total. She beat the entire Japanese contingent. She reclaimed the title of most-followed figure skater on Instagram, displacing Alexandra Vyacheslavovna in the process. But the real victory was happening offline: a near-perfect technical execution married to a performance that felt inevitable, like watching someone finally remember why they loved something. What made Liu go viral was not just the gold. It was the visual. Piercings. Unconventional hair. A hairstyle that reads as deliberately anti-figure-skating establishment. In a sport still governed by outdated codes about femininity and presentation, Liu arrived looking like someone who had spent four years at