Given her performance at the Milano Cortina Olympics, American figure skater Alysa Liu is one of the more in-demand athletes on the planet.
The 20-year-old Olympic gold medalist has been making the rounds on her post-Olympics media tour, and on Saturday Rolling Stone posted a 40-minute interview with her in which it covered a variety of topics.
One of the things Liu was asked about included her rigorous training regimen, and when reporter Alex Morris asked her about one key detail of that training, her response turned plenty of heads.
“You were literally told, like, you can’t drink water — everything was monitored, everything was controlled?” Morris asked.
“Yes, yeah,” Liu replied. “It was crazy because they were like, ‘Oh, water weight — you shouldn’t drink water, shou should gargle it.’ Yeah, crazy. It’s insane.”
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Liu’s remarks, while widely regarded as the norm in women’s competitive sports like figure skating and gymnastics, brought about some pretty strong reactions from users on social media irate over how her coaches treated her.
“This is literally child abuse man like what the hell are we doing? GARGLE WATER???,” one fan scoffed.
“Being a professional athlete and having your coaches deny you water and tell you to gargle it to lose weight is absolutely insane. I’m glad Alysa is speaking out about it, because it’s crucial that younger athletes understand that this is abuse,” another fan replied.
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“Nah doing this to a child is straight up evil. And actually it’s the opposite cause your body retains more water weight if you don’t drink enough water to prevent dehydration. So they were wrong AND cruel,” a third fan wrote.
“These sports are such abuse like wdym they told a child to gargle water instead of drink it so she wouldn’t gain any weight,” remarked one user.
“Genuinely [expletive] bonkers that coaches say this to skaters as though consistently dehydrating a heavily active competitive athlete isn’t going to negatively impact their performance,” another user reacted.
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