Scott Hamilton commenting on TV: First jump is a triple flip. She doubles it.
Olivia Allen-Price: I was so smitten, I begged my parents for ice skating lessons the following Christmas. I got them and went every week, but it didn’t take too long for my Olympic dreams to melt when faced with reality. I was only okay. Oh well. I may have hung up my skates, but over the past few Olympic cycles, I’ve gotten really into following our local Olympians, both those who were born here in the Bay Area and those who reside here now. Here to discuss some of the local athletes to cheer on is Natalia Navarro. She is the afternoon anchor of KQED News and a fellow Olympics fan. Welcome, Natalia.
Natalia Navarro: Thank you so much for having me. I was also obsessed with watching skating as a child, watched it with my mom, I have very similar memories. We will compare notes after. Yeah.
Olivia Allen-Price: Also here is a voice you know well, Katrina Schwartz, editor and producer for Bay Curious. She’s also a big fan of the Olympics, often waffling between whether she likes winter or the summer games more. Where are you at right now?
Katrina Schwartz: I mean, whichever one is on is the one I like the best, but I will say I have a particular fondness right now for the Summer Olympics because I was home on maternity leave with a newborn baby during the July, whatever, 2024 Summer Olympics. So I watched them like obsessively. I watched every sport, like every event.
Olivia Allen-Price: That sounds lovely. And finally, we have Sarah Wright. She is KQED’s outdoors reporter. And Sarah, you grew up in Tahoe and you are a former ski racer yourself and you even trained alongside some now Olympians.
Sarah Wright: Yes, it’s very exciting to get to watch them as they live out all of our dream. I similarly quit when I was young because I wasn’t very good, but had a great time training.
Olivia Allen-Price: Gosh, I love that. And I love how we’ve all had like a little bit of our own Olympic dream. So I want to start with what is your favorite winter Olympic sport to watch? And is there one that you secretly think, had you maybe have dedicated your life to it, you might be good at? Katrina, you’re up first.
Katrina Schwartz: All right, to watch…I really like the snowboard cross which is the one where like just like four are racing and they’re like jockeying for position I just I’m a snowboarder and if that looks really hard basically based on what I know of snowboarding Honestly, I think I’d be terrible at all of the winter Olympic sports, but maybe like bobsled I was really I love cool runnings as a kid So like, you know, I have dreams that I too could just run really fast on the ice.
Olivia Allen-Price: What about you, Sarah?
Sarah Wright: Well, I’ll find ski racing as my favorite, mostly because I actually know the sport, unlike many of the other Winter Olympics sports. So I can follow along with the drama and the high stakes and unfortunately the injuries, which happen in almost every single Olympics. And as far as competing, I have absolutely no ice skills, but I have small dreams of ice hockey and would love to someday be able to compete, even just casually as an ice hockey player. I think it’d be really fun. And lots of good local teams here in the Bay Area.
Natalia Navarro: Ice skating, of course. Figure skating. I just loved it as a child so much and I never took lessons as a kid or anything. I just really enjoyed it and I loved watching it with my mom. My icons were Michelle Kwan and Oksana Bayul. But then actually as an adult, I took adult ice skating lessons for about a year. Was not great at it, but boy.
Olivia Allen-Price: Did I have fun? I love that. And well, let’s stay there with ice skating, because I want to talk about our first Bay Area Olympian, who we’ll be discussing today. And that’s US figure skater, Alyssa Liu. She was born in Richmond, but lives in Oakland now. And she really wowed judges at the US Figure Skating Championships in January. She has a ton of fans. Natalia, what do you think makes her so much fun to watch?
Natalia Navarro: She really reminds me of those skaters that I grew up watching. Her skating is so fluid, so relaxed and she actually looks like she’s having a great time. She doesn’t look like everyone else which I personally relate to and love so much like she has this really signature look right now. She’s got this this bleached halo striped hair, she’s got some cool piercings going on and she seems to have really her own perspective to communicate. It just really brings me back and she looks so effortless on the ice right now. She was actually the youngest and first American woman to ever land a triple axel in international competition at just 12 years old. That’s one of the most difficult jumps and it’s become her signature. She’s got two exciting programs to watch. Her short program is really expressive and emotional. And her free skate is to a Lady Gaga medley and it’s very, very fun.
Olivia Allen-Price: Now this is Alyssa’s second Olympics. As you said, she’s been skating at a very high level for a long time. So even though she’s only 20 years old, she’s really a veteran in the sport, but she did step away from the sport for a while. Tell us about that.
Natalia Navarro: She was very, very good at skating in a very young age. So she was primarily homeschooled during most of her life. She was living in the dorms at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado. And she got to this point around, you know, 15, 16 years old. Where she really was missing out on a lot of what we all want as teens and young adults. That isolation and lack of social interaction, it was really taking a toll on her mental health. She hung up her skates. She thought it was for good. She retired at just 16 years old. And she went about her life. She got to be a normal kid. And then, you know, in January of 2024, at that point she was at UCLA going to college. She went skiing in Lake Tahoe, which is not something that you can do when you’re an elite figure skater and you’re worried about getting injured. She was just having fun. And she realized on that trip that she really missed skating. She announced her return to competition in March of 2024 and just came back like a storm. She won the 2025 world championships and it is really working. Like she is a different person on the ice now. He or she is talking about all of this with Jimmy Fallon. What makes skating feel different now?
Alysa Liu: Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of creative control this time around. You know, I get to pick out what I want my dress to look like, what color I want to use. Sometimes I’ll drop a real bad sketch, send it to my dress designer, see if she can decipher it. I pick my music and I control my training. You know what I’m saying? My schedule, I draw myself. So, yeah.
Olivia Allen-Price: She’s also a Bay Area super fan. I follow her on social media and you can sometimes spot familiar Bay Area vistas or businesses in her posts and she’s always talking about how much she loves Oakland, which just makes my heart sing. Do you think she has a shot at the podium?
Natalia Navarro: Well, Russia and Japan have dominated the last few Olympic podiums, but she has a pretty high baseline score for all of her elements. I think she absolutely has a chance to get onto that podium, but you know what she said is she doesn’t really care about the results anymore. It’s not the medal that fulfills her, she said. She just wants to share her art with the world. That creative expression is really clear at her skating and I think it’s going to serve her well.
Olivia Allen-Price: I hope so. I’ll be rooting for her. Okay, so for this next athlete, we’re staying on the ice, but let’s pick up the pace. I wanna talk about speed skater, Brandon Kim. He’s a rising senior at Stanford, majoring in computer science, but on the pre-med track. And he’ll be making his debut at the Winter Olympics this year in short track speed skating.
Katrina Schwartz: Yeah, this guy is wild. When he’s at Stanford, he doesn’t even have an ice rink to practice at, so he’s been keeping up his fitness by himself while he’s like focused on his studies half the year. He talked with KQED’s Brian Watt the other day, and he said that getting the feel of the ice is a really important part of speed skating. So when he flies out to a competition over a long weekend, the first day or two, he’s just trying to like feel the ice again, and that’s really hard.
Brandon Kim: Yeah, I would say definitely my journey to where I am now is totally different from I guess what you would say like a traditional like skater or athlete might be. I’m a full-time student, so being away from the ice, flying out, having just one or two days to acclimate myself and compete again, it’s definitely something that not many, if any skaters have done.
Katrina Schwartz: With the Olympics in play, this past year has been a little bit different. He took a few quarters off of school so that he could practice full time in Salt Lake City with the rest of the speed.
Olivia Allen-Price: Speed skating is such a fun sport to watch. The track is 111 meters around, which, if you think about it, is really tiny. For context, the shortest distance that’s raced on the outdoor track is 100 meters. So just turn that into a doughnut. The curves are so tight that the racers, I mean, they’re practically horizontal on the ice as they are whipping around those turns.
Katrina Schwartz: Yeah, they reach up to 30 miles per hour.
Olivia Allen-Price: Wow.
Brandon Kim: In short track, you never know exactly what will happen just because you know, you’re racing in a group, you’re passing different people. So there can be a lot of collisions, falls.
Katrina Schwartz: Like Alyssa Liu, Brandon has been at this since he was really young. He first saw speed skating in the Vancouver Olympics and thought it looked really cool, but there was just one problem.
Brandon Kim: I definitely did not skate at all. When I first started, my coach gave me a bucket or like a folding chair to push around because I was falling so much.
Katrina Schwartz: Well, it seems like he figured it out. Yeah, he said to compete in the 500, the 1000, and the 1,500-meter races, with people thinking his best chances are probably in the five hundred.
Olivia Allen-Price: We’re going to take a quick break, but when we return, more Bay Area Olympians. Stay with us. And we’re back, talking Bay Area Olympians that you can cheer for over the coming weeks. Sarah, who are you excited to pull for?
Sarah Wright: There are actually a number of athletes who are from the Bay Area here or spend a lot of time around here but are competing for other countries during this Olympics like freestyle skier Eileen Gu. She was born and raised in San Francisco and is a current student at Stanford but she’s competing for Team China, a move that she also made ahead of the 2022 Beijing Olympics And, at the time, it drew a lot of controversy. Especially after she earned three medals, including two golds, one in big air and the other in half pipe. And she was only 18 when she did those, right? Yeah, she was the youngest Olympic gold medalist in history in her sport, which if you haven’t ever watched it, it’s pretty incredible. And it’s not just Eileen, there are also a handful of ice hockey players who on the San Jose Sharks right now. And who made their respective country’s teams. So there’s Pavel Rogenda, representing Team Slovakia, Filip Kirishchev for Team Switzerland, Alexander Wenberg for Team Sweden, and Macklin Celebrini for Team Canada. But if I’m being honest, I might be the most excited to watch Laila Leponia. She will be racing slalom for Team Slovenia, and she and I actually grew up ski racing together in Tahoe. She’s been working toward her Olympic dream since we were kids and she just messaged me and said she’s very excited to be competing.
Olivia Allen-Price: Wow, that’s amazing to be like, I don’t know, thinking back to your childhood memories and put an Olympian in there.
Sarah Wright: Yeah, we were all working very hard. She was working the hardest.
Olivia Allen-Price: Well, right on the heels of the Olympics is the Paralympics, which will be held in the same spot, but about a month later, from March 6th through 15th. And Daly City’s Jen Young Lee is headed back for his fourth Paralympics. He is the goalie on Team USA’s sled hockey team, and he’s won gold each time he’s been there. Last go around in Beijing, he had zero goals scored on him for the entire tournament. Wow. I mean perfection.
Katrina Schwartz: Yeah, he’s an intense competitor and he’s got an incredible story. I mean, honestly, a lot of Paralympians have incredible stories for how they came to their sport. He was a veteran. He served in Iraq and tragically, he lost his leg in a motorcycle accident that actually happened while he was on leave, but it ended his military career and he was rehabbing in a military hospital when he was introduced to sled hockey. It brought him back because he went to Thomas Edison Elementary in Daly City and he used to play stick ball. And, you know, he had fun. He liked the Mighty Ducks, just like anybody else, but he never thought he was gonna like play ice hockey until this was offered to him as part of his rehab and he just loved it and he was good at it. So he’s been a staple for the team for many, many years now. It’s his fourth Olympic Games. And he understands that there are a lot of guys younger than him who like need him to kind of step up right now.
Jen Young Lee: My other role is really being a leader for the younger guys. We got young guys who were still in high school.
Olivia Allen-Price: Anybody making four Paralympic teams is impressive, but especially in a sport that’s as demanding as hockey.
Katrina Schwartz: Seriously, when I chatted with him last week he was living in Colorado. They’re doing this intense residency where they all live together and do two-a-days and just constantly are training. And he said he couldn’t feel his arms. So yeah, they are training a lot. He’s clearly a fierce competitor and amazing athlete, but he says that this might be his last Olympic games, he has a young daughter who will be in Milan cheering for him.
Jen Young Lee: I just want to be closer with my daughter and be a little bit more a full-time dad, right? So that is kind of scary. There’s definitely a lot of options as far as, you know, go coaching or do something, you know with the hockey or, but a lot of those things are unknown, uncertain. And we’re just going to see how that, how those things go after the games, you know.
Olivia Allen-Price: All right, well, good luck to Jen as well. This is overall a pretty small sampling of our local athletes going, but there are more athletes that we didn’t get to talk about today. Sarah, maybe give us a couple highlights.
Sarah Wright: Yes, so Nina O’Brien, she’s a San Francisco native, an alpine ski racer coming back from breaking her leg twice, the first time was racing at the last Olympics. We also have biathlete Joanne Reed. She was born in Palo Alto and she’s also coming back, this after a sexual harassment case that took years to be taken seriously by US biathlon officials. She comes from a family of Olympians. Her mom is a bronze medalist in speed skating. And her uncle is a five-time gold medalist in the sport. There’s other legacy athletes as well. Anthony Ponomarenko from San Jose. He’s the son of two Russian ice dancing medalists. He takes the ice with his long-time dancing partner, Christina Carrera. Their moms set them up in 2014, and they’ve been a pair ever since. That’s so cute.
Olivia Allen-Price: It is. All right, Sarah, and you have a helpful guide on all the Bay Area Olympians at KQED.org. So if you’re listening, be sure to go check that out. Sarah Wright, Natalia Navarro, Katrina Schwartz, thank you for talking Olympics with me today. Shall we bring it in on three?
Everyone: Yeah.
Olivia Allen-Price: Let’s do it. Go team on three. One, two, three…
Everyone: Go team.
Olivia Allen-Price: Bay Curious is made in San Francisco at member-supported KQED. Become a member today at kqed.org slash donate. Our show is produced by Katrina Schwartz, Christopher Beale and me, Olivia Allen Price. Extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Springer, Jen Chien, Ethan Tovan Lindsey and everyone on Team KQED.
Some members of the KQEd podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California, local. I’m Olivia Allen-Price, see you next time. Go team on three.
Everyone: One, two, three, go team!
Natalia Navarro: Can we do it again? I forgot to say anything.
Katrina Schwartz: I feel like usually only one person does the count. Should we all say the count?
Olivia Allen-Price: Yeah, you guys just say go team.
Everyone: Okay. Okay.
