Winter Olympics 2026: Amber Glenn embraces Olympic opportunity and her true self

MILAN — The rink at the Enterprise Center in St. Louis glowed a deep indigo. Tenley Albright, the gold medalist skater at the 1956 Olympics in Cortina, sported the same crimson jacket she had worn at those games. That day, the official announcement of the Milan-Cortina Team USA skaters marked a passing of the torch ceremony, a union of generations, and Albright had the honor of welcoming the newest American Olympian to the ice.

“Innovative, creative, a fiery spirit on the ice,” Albright began. Even though the entire arena already knew who she was talking about, cheers rang out as Albright continued: “She just won her third national championship…”

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Then Amber Glenn, 26, came out from behind a curtain, hugged Albright, stepped onto the ice…and skated toward her future.

Once they stop falling, children smile as they skate. Why not ? Sliding at high speed on the ice is a thrill. Why not let the world know how you feel, like Amber Glenn did when she was learning to skate at the Stonebriar Center Mall in suburban Dallas?

“I was fortunate to be in the Dallas-Fort Worth area,” Glenn said recently, crediting the Dallas Stars with a role in his origin. “We were able to build a lot of rinks after their (Stanley Cup) win in 1999, which really helped strengthen a large skating community in Texas. »

Smiling is good for the mall, but for the competition, well… the judges may disapprove of the skaters’ smiles. The sport is undergoing a slow metamorphosis, but certain old habits persist: too much joy, too much exuberance unbalances performance in the eyes of certain judges.

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“Even when I was a kid, I think I was 10, I was told to tone it down, because it wasn’t graceful,” she recently told NBC’s “My New Favorite Olympian” podcast. “I was skating to ‘Live and Let Die’ and old classic rock and roll songs that I love. Like, I’m not trying to be a lady, I’m trying to enjoy my sport.”

Glenn’s mother, Cathlene, remembers that the judges suggested ways for Glenn to fit the “ice princess” mold: cut down on carbs, be more graceful and, in the words of one judge, “don’t do that big smile anymore.” For a young skater who had already dedicated her entire childhood to skating, being homeschooled in order to focus more on the ice, the pressure and walls around her were growing.

But Glenn kept skating and, more importantly for his career, kept winning. While her police officer father worked overtime and her parents scoured eBay for used skates, she racked up victory after victory, locally, nationally and internationally. She won bronze at the 2013 ISU Junior Grand Prix in the Czech Republic, then won the junior title at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships the following year.

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Yet despite these victories, Glenn struggled with a range of mental health issues throughout the 2010s, culminating in his toughest fight at the age of 15.

“I had a mental health crisis and had to completely stop everything,” she says. “I stopped skating for a while not knowing whether or not I would come back, and I had to prioritize survival and getting to the next day for quite a while. And it took me many years to get to a place where I could skate healthy again.”

In doing so, she began to reclaim parts of herself that she had given away. In 2019, she began skating to Madilyn’s cover of Papa Roach’s “Scars,” a song whose lyrics are a far cry from the saccharine orchestral music that typically accompanies skating routines.

Our scars remind us that the past is real
I tear my heart apart just to feel

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Later that year, she publicly came out as pansexual in an interview with the Dallas Voice. “The fear of not being accepted is a huge struggle for me,” she told Voice. “Being perceived as [going through] “just a phase” or “undecided” is a common thing for bisexual/pansexual women. I don’t want to show my sexuality to people, but I also don’t want to hide who I am.”

“I thought, Oh, I’ll just talk about it in an article that was about someone else“, Glenn recalled recently. “They were my training buddies. And I thought, Ok, this is my little baby step, and almost no one will see it. It was a local newspaper. Yeah…it didn’t stay local.

Glenn’s announcement sent shockwaves through the skating community, but at her very first event after the interview, she started seeing Pride flags in the stands. Fans bring flags to every competition, to every exhibition, up until the U.S. championships in St. Louis last month.

“It wasn’t something I was necessarily prepared for, but I was pretty comfortable with my friends and family, and that’s all that really mattered to me,” she says. “And if people had a problem with that, then they had a problem with me, and I don’t need them in my life. So it was just, if you don’t like me for me, then that’s your problem, not mine.”

“She is so special and, I think, important to our sport, in the way that she is so open and vulnerable about her mental health issues and her struggles,” said Tara Lipinski, an Olympic gold medalist and NBC commentator, “and in the way that she overcomes the doubts and pressure that she faces.”

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Upfront and honest about his struggles, Glenn seemed on a direct trajectory to the 2022 Olympics in Beijing. But she tested positive for Covid just before the 2022 U.S. Championships, costing her a spot on the team. The following year, she suffered her second concussion and orbital bone fractures…and still refused to give up and give in.

Glenn won the U.S. championships in 2024, then repeated the feat in 2025 and this year in 2026, the first three-time winner since Michelle Kwan won eight in a row from 1998 to 2005. She is the eldest of the new “Big Three,” along with Alysa Liu and Isabeau Levito, who both won national championships at a much younger age than Glenn.

Ranked third overall in the world, Glenn is one of the best bets to end the long Olympic medal drought in U.S. women’s skating. No American woman has won a medal in singles figure skating at the Olympics since Sasha Cohen’s silver in 2006, and no American woman has won gold in figure skating since Sarah Hughes in 2002.

“Amber Glenn is an emotional favorite because of everything she’s been through,” said Olympian and NBC commentator Johnny Weir. “She really wears her heart on her sleeve when she performs, which makes her very welcoming to watch.”

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Ironically, his openness about his mental difficulties allowed him to redirect his attention to his performance. “Honestly, when I’m competing, I think about what I’m doing at that moment, because if I don’t do it, I’m going to trip and fall on my face,” she says. “So I have to think about what I’m doing in that moment, remembering to breathe and just trying to enjoy the moment, because it’s over quickly.”

When the Olympics were officially announced in January, after kissing Albright, Glenn skated an exhibition routine to Lady Gaga’s version of “That’s Life,” a selection that was surely no coincidence. Glenn skated, his long blond hair flowing freely, as lines like “Every time I find myself flat on my face / I get back up and get back in the race” echoed through the arena.

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“I definitely peaked later in my career than most. I never thought I’d still be skating at 26. I thought I’d be done a long time ago,” Glenn says. “I keep doing it because I love it and I’m getting better every day.”

It’s a long way from a skating rink in a suburban Dallas mall to the center of the skating universe, but Glenn is finally about to complete the journey.