So the 2026 Winter Olympics just wrapped up about 48 hours ago, and the last week of the games was pretty remarkable for the United States if you guys are following along, but par!

For the course, some liberals are literally having to consult their therapists on how to cope with their feelings about the Olympics.

And no, I am not joking.

Now, before we dive into this story, I want to tell you guys that I am doing another show at Zanis on March 1st.

So if you are in the Nashville area, the Tennessee area at large, come see the show. It is super fun. We basically just do a live version of the show. You can find tickets at Brett Cooper.com. If you want to see behind the scenes content and farm vlogs and butter that my mom and I are making in her kitchen, and you can go to go to gopercom and all of that content will be there.

Okay, deep breath. I made it through that.

All right, so there have been

some pretty massive standouts in the last week of the Olympics, but possibly, I would say objectively,

the most viral and most universally loved has been American skater Alyssa Liu, having an

incredible, just momentous comeback in winning gold in women's ice skating. For a little backstory in 2022, right after the Beijing Winter Olympics, Alyssa retired. She was only 16 years old and she was one of the best female ice skaters in the world, but she said that she was burned out. She had just lost her love of the sport. But then, two years later, when she was 18 years old, she called up her coaches and

she said, you know what, I am ready to come back. But if she was going to come back, she was going

to do it on her own terms. She did an interview that now has gone viral and she said, you know, I'm not going to be starving myself. I'm going to be setting my own practice times. I want to be doing the music that I want to dance to. I want to do this my own way. I'm not going to try to

fit into these conventional ice skating molds anymore. I'm just going to be Alyssa, you can love it or

you can hate it, but I want to skate just because I love it. And apparently, that was the winning strategy. Well, people have loved even more than her just bringing home a gold medal is her radiant joy that she was showing throughout this entire Olympic Games. She came back onto the ice now four years later as a completely different skater, a completely different person, and that was infectious.

She has become so well loved, which is why people are now playing politics and they are trying

to fight over her. We will get to that. But for now, just watch her free skate routine from

the finals. It was so much fun.

It was so much fun.

And the best part was, to me at least, like not only was she having so much fun, but she finished that, looking so proud and so confident. Like she knew that she crushed it. And people loved her even more when she ran right up to the cameras after that routine and she said this.

That's what I'm fucking talking about.

Thank you, Lisa. So she said that's what I'm effing talking about. And obviously you can be like, oh, Brett, she shouldn't be swearing, whatever. But like, she had so much joy. Like, after retiring because she had fallen out of love with the sport, coming back on her own term, saying, I'm not going to fit into your mold, I'm not going to starve myself, I'm not going to prioritize this over just being just being a young person and having friends and pursuing other things. I just want to do this because I love it. And then crushing that routine like this. Like she hadn't even received her scores yet. She had not won a gold medal. She was just so happy to be on the ice doing what she loves. Like how can you not root for that? Like again, it's just infectious. But she is not the only one who has evoked that feeling. Like people are already pointing to how she primarily, but also other skaters like Quad God, are completely changing the sport. One person posted and said, four years ago, figure skating looked like a sport where you won by driving literal children to the point of mental breakdowns. With Alyssa Liu's win, it looks like a sport where you win when skaters have agency and freedom to be themselves and skate to find joy. And I'm not gonna lie, guys, you know this about me, but I am so emotional. So as I was scrolling through and like bookmarking all of these posts, I started tearing up at some of the before and after fan edits like showing what she looked like when she was skating as little girl. she would come off the ice and she would be crying,

she would be so upset with herself. And then now how she's skating today, there was one particular edit that was set to a song from Hamilton. It was set to wait for it if you guys are also theater geeks like me. You probably cannot play that one because of copyright issues. But just like, no, for me and for my like fellow theater kids, it was incredibly moving. I was sitting scrolling last night, just crying over it.

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