Inside the minds of two US Olympians — and how they achieve greatness

NEW YORK — Erin Jackson, the pragmatic speedskater, missed practices in high school while she was building a robot.

Alysa Liu, the free-spirited U.S. figure skater, quit the sport at 16 and climbed to Mount Everest base camp in Nepal.

This pair of U.S. Olympians, each with her own winding journey, demonstrate how different personality traits and cognitive styles — how their brains work — can lead to athletic greatness.

“Different athletes may arrive at excellence via very different mixes of focus, creativity, emotional control, risk tolerance and social engagement," Paul McCarthy, a psychologist in Great Britain who has worked with athletes, told USA TODAY Sports. “The sport sets the constraints; the brain finds its own solution."

And some brains are built better for Olympic success.

Jackson, 33, won the women’s 500-meter speed skating event at the 2022 Beijing Games and became the first Black woman to win a gold medal in an individual event at the Winter Olympics. She also graduated cum laude from the University of Florida Honors Program with a Bachelor of Science in Materials Science & Engineering.

Liu, 20, became the youngest U.S. women’s figure skating champion at age 13. She spent a year studying at UCLA before ending her two-year hiatus from skating in 2024 and becoming a world champion in 2025.

Their approaches are as different as their disciplines, but both women are expected to contend for gold medals at the 2026 Winter Olympics.

Alysa Liu can't live without fun

In October, Liu was one of about 60 athletes to attend the Team USA media summit in New York ahead of these winter games in Milano Cortina. She was the only athlete to modify a standard blue United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee T-shirt to create an off-the-shoulder look.

“… I was like, I can't change the color, but I can change the shape and I have haircutting scissors with me," she explained.

Viola!

As singular as her remixed T-shirt, Liu said she seeks fun that has included late-night karaoke and a trip to a video game café near her home in Northern California that kept her out until 4 a.m.

“I just can't live without fun," she said. " … Some days I oversleep my training and I wake up and I’m like, 'Now what?' And then some days I'll be like, ‘Hmm, now I want to go to (Lake) Tahoe and swim.' And so we'll do that."

She also talked of hiking in Nepal with a friend and her friend's mother. “We were fighting over the silliest things, like, would you rather be a cow or a chicken? … But trust it was deep and meaningful.”

Of figure skating, Liu said, “It's definitely an art form. I view it very much as that. But it satisfies me on a technical side, like spins and jumps and running the program itself, those are really hard. Those are difficult. And I like being an athlete.

“And then this sport, it's also artistic. You get to pick music, design your dresses, do choreography, like dancing, but it's very limited ... you can't do hip hop on ice. That does not look good. A lot of dance styles are awkward on the ice and you're not able to portray. I have a lot of concepts in my head. I'm not able to do them in skating, and that's fine. So I'll just have to find another outlet for that part of my brain, I guess.”

At the U.S. figure skating championships in January, Liu debuted a new, edgy free skate set to the music of Lady Gaga. She also sported alternating stripes of platinum blond in her naturally dark hair.

Brian Boitano, the retired figure skater who won an Olympic gold medal in 1988, said the decision was “in Alysa Liu fashion."