Alysa Liu didn’t just win Olympic gold. She won the internet.

There is something quietly disruptive about watching Alysa Liu skate. She steps onto the ice with halo hair that she describes as growing in rings like a tree marking time, a self-pierced smiley glinting beneath an almost mischievous grin, and proceeds to inhabit a discipline that has long demanded obedience and containment, as if it were simply another medium to experiment with. At 20, Liu is America’s first Olympic women’s figure skating gold medalist in 24 years. But the reason she feels electric has less to do with the medal and more to do with the manner in which she…