Amber Glenn

#1Amber Glenn opened her free skate at the 2024 U.S. Championships with a triple Axel. Three and a half rotations. Landed.

#2Then the program started slipping.

#3Late in the skate, a planned triple Lutz became a double. A triple flip became a single. When the music stopped, Glenn lowered herself onto the ice and bowed her head.

#4She thought she'd done it again. The big moment had come, and she'd let it get away.

#5Her score put her in first for the moment. But defending champion Isabeau Levito still had to skate.

#6So Glenn waited.

#7Levito fell three times.

#8Then the final result appeared.

#9Amber Glenn was the U.S. champion.

#10She looked stunned. She'd been to senior nationals nine times, and this was the first one she'd won.

#11Except there was something strange about calling Glenn a first-time U.S. champion.

#12She'd already been one ten years earlier.

#13Glenn won the U.S. junior title in 2014. She was 14.

#14That result came with baggage almost immediately. The two junior champions before her, Gracie Gold and Polina Edmunds, had both finished second at senior nationals the following season. Both went to the Sochi Olympics.

#15So when Glenn won, people could see the pattern.

#16Amber was next.

#17There was another moment that made the future feel almost scripted. As a kid, Glenn had watched a DVD of Sarah Hughes winning Olympic gold in 2002 over and over. After Glenn won her junior national title, Hughes herself called to congratulate her.

#18It looked like the beginning of exactly the career everyone expected.

#19Then Glenn went to her first senior U.S. Championships.

#20She finished 13th.

#21And soon, skating results weren't even the biggest problem.

#22Figure skating didn't just take up part of Glenn's childhood. It shaped almost all of it.

#23Her father, Richard, worked as a police officer and piled on overtime and extra security jobs to help pay for skating. Her mother, Cathlene, worked at the rink, cared for a coach's children in exchange for reduced lesson costs, made costumes, and stretched the family's skating budget wherever she could.

#24Amber was homeschooled around training. Her younger sister Brooke eventually went back to a regular school and a more ordinary social life. Amber stayed with skating.

#25Brooke later described her sister's world in three repetitions:

#26"Figure skating, figure skating, figure skating."

#27Around 15, that world broke down.

#28Glenn was struggling with depression, anxiety, and an eating disorder. She entered mental health treatment. She even left a treatment facility to compete at her first senior international event, a competition she later called a disaster and said she barely remembered.

#29Mental health professionals told her to step away from competition.

#30That left her parents in a brutal position. They'd spent years rearranging their lives to keep their daughter's dream alive. Now protecting their daughter might mean helping her walk away from it.

#31Glenn stopped skating for months.

#32When she came back, it wasn't with some grand comeback plan.

#33She wanted to find out if skating could be fun again.

#34The results crept upward.

#35Eighth at the U.S. Championships in 2017. Eighth again in 2018. Seventh in 2019. Fifth in 2020.

#36Glenn hadn't disappeared. She was competing internationally. She was improving.

#37But she wasn't becoming the star people had imagined at 14.

#38Something else was changing during those years, though. At the rink, Glenn trained alongside Timothy LeDuc, a queer skater who lived openly in a sport where Glenn had spent years wondering how much of herself she could show.

#39She also confided in her longtime friend Ashley Cain-Gribble. She thought she might like a girl, she told her, and she didn't know what to do with that.

#40In 2019, Glenn publicly identified as bisexual and pansexual. Only afterward, she said, did she realize how much weight she'd been carrying.

#41But this isn't the part where coming out magically fixed her skating.

#42It didn't.

#43The 2020 U.S. Championships were Glenn's first nationals after coming out publicly.

#44Before she skated, she looked into the stands.

#45Pride flags.

#46She almost cried.

#47But one of the moments that stayed with her happened nowhere near the ice.

#48A young fan approached Glenn in a hotel with her mother. The girl had been struggling with her gender identity. After reading about Glenn, she'd finally felt able to tell her mother who she was.

#49The mother thanked Glenn. Her daughter, she explained, had been going through a very dark time.

#50The girl cried. Her mother cried. Then Glenn cried.

#51The three of them stood there in a hotel lobby crying together.

#52Glenn wasn't the U.S. champion yet. She didn't have a world medal. She hadn't made an Olympic team.

#53But she'd already become proof to someone else that there was another way to exist in the sport.

#54Meanwhile, her skating kept moving.

#55In 2020, she began landing the triple Axel she'd chased for years in practice. In 2021, she finished second at the U.S. Championships.

#56It looked like the long wait might finally be ending.

#57Then she wasn't chosen for the World Championships team.

#58And the next season brought an even bigger chance.

#59The Olympics.

#60The 2022 U.S. Championships would help decide the Beijing Olympics team.

#61On the day of the short program, Glenn knew something was wrong. She hoped competition adrenaline would kick in once she got on the ice.

#62It didn't.

#63She later described the feeling as if she were watching herself from the stands.

#64She finished 14th.

#65Then she tested positive for COVID-19 and withdrew before the free skate.

#66That was it. The Olympic chance was gone.

#67The girl who'd looked like a future Olympian at 14 was now 22 and still hadn't made an Olympic team.

#68Glenn came away feeling that this wasn't a one-jump problem or a one-program problem anymore.

#69She needed to rebuild everything from the ground up.

#70So she left Texas.

#71In the spring of 2022, Glenn moved to Colorado Springs. It was the first time she'd lived away from Texas and away from her parents.

#72She started working with Damon Allen and Tammy Gambill. Glenn told Allen she wasn't even sure how much longer she wanted to keep skating.

#73Then Allen noticed something odd.

#74Glenn had years of international competition behind her. She had difficult jumps. But she hadn't been doing enough systematic, competition-style run-throughs of her full programs.

#75This wasn't just about fitness.

#76Glenn's mind had a habit of racing ahead of her body. She could be doing one jump while already thinking about the next one. Or replaying the mistake she'd just made. Or calculating what that mistake might do to the score.

#77By the second half of a free skate, her mind could be exhausted before her body was.

#78So they changed the work. More full run-throughs. More competition simulation. They also adjusted the program layout so the same difficult cluster of elements didn't pile up late in the skate.

#79"I fall apart under pressure" had sounded like one giant problem.

#80Now it could be broken into smaller ones.

#81That still didn't fix everything.

#82At 2023 Skate America, Glenn was back in Texas.

#83Her family was there. Friends were there. Even a teacher she'd known when she was six came to watch.

#84She opened the free skate with a triple Axel.

#85Up. Around. Down.

#86Clean.

#87The crowd got so loud Glenn could barely hear her music.

#88This was supposed to be the breakthrough scene.

#89Except she didn't win.

#90Mistakes came later in the program. Glenn finished fifth overall.

#91And that made something painfully clear.

#92The triple Axel wasn't the missing piece.

#93She already had the jump.

#94The harder skill was carrying an entire program through without letting one huge success — or one mistake — take over everything that came next.

#95Then came that 2024 U.S. Championships victory.

#96Glenn finally had her first senior national title. But the opening scene tells you why it wasn't a neat ending. She'd landed the triple Axel, lost jumps late, and finished the skate believing she'd thrown away her chance.

#97Two months later, she finished 10th at the World Championships.

#98So the easy explanation didn't work either.

#99Move to Colorado. Get a new coach. Problem solved.

#100No.

#101Glenn kept working in sports psychology, and in the spring of 2024 she added neurotherapy. One goal, in her words, was to get her brain to calm down.

#102That wasn't some magic switch that made her a champion.

#103What mattered was that the problem was getting more specific.

#104Where did her attention go after a mistake? What happened to her level of arousal? When did her focus start slipping? How could she come back to the thing happening now instead of racing ahead to whatever might go wrong next?

#105Then the second half of 2024 arrived.

#106And the results started looking very different.

#107Glenn won the Grand Prix de France.

#108Then she won the Cup of China.

#109That put her in the Grand Prix Final, where the top performers from the series meet.

#110She led after the short program and landed her triple Axel.

#111But physically, she wasn't feeling great. Her ribs and back hurt, and the free skate wasn't perfect. One planned triple became a double. Another jump had a shaky landing.

#112For the old Glenn, this was dangerous territory.

#113One mistake. Keep carrying it. Lose the next thing too.

#114This time?

#115She made the mistake. Then did the next thing. Then the next.

#116She finished.

#117And she won.

#118Glenn became the first American woman since 2010 to win the Grand Prix Final.

#119What she said afterward was almost as revealing as the result. She didn't talk about the free skate as some soaring emotional performance. It felt more like a demonstration of skills. There was a job to do, and she'd done it.

#120Maybe that was the breakthrough.

#121Amber Glenn hadn't become perfect.

#122She'd gotten better at continuing.

#123Maybe she'd just caught a hot streak.

#124At the 2025 U.S. Championships, Glenn was third after the short program. In the free skate, she landed the triple Axel, then fell on a triple loop later on.

#125But the fall didn't take the rest of the program with it.

#126She came back and won her second straight national title.

#127The 2025 World Championships pushed harder. Glenn fell on the opening triple Axel in the short program and dropped to ninth.

#128In the free skate, she tried the triple Axel again.

#129This time, she landed it.

#130She climbed to fifth overall.

#131Then she won the 2026 U.S. Championships too.

#132Three straight national titles.

#133It had taken ten years to go from junior champion to senior champion. Once she finally reached the top, she stayed there for three seasons.

#134And this time, when the Olympic team was named, Amber Glenn was on it.

#135At Milano Cortina 2026, Glenn finally became an Olympian.

#136She won gold with the United States in the team event too.

#137Then came the women's individual competition.

#138The short program went badly.

#13913th.

#140That number felt familiar.

#141Four years earlier, she'd finished 14th in the short program at the U.S. Championships, tested positive for COVID, and never got the chance to skate the free.

#142This time, there was another skate.

#143Glenn came back onto the ice.

#144She skated the free.

#145And she climbed all the way to fifth overall.

#146No individual Olympic medal. No perfect ending.

#147Which is exactly why the result says so much.

#148Amber Glenn didn't become the skater who never falls apart.

#149She still makes mistakes in big competitions. She still feels pressure. She can still lose focus.

#150What changed was what came after.

#151Make the next jump after the fall. Skate the free after the bad short. Don't turn one failure into a verdict on the rest of the competition — or the rest of your career.

#152That took years.

#153There wasn't one secret. Coming out doesn't explain it by itself. Neither does the triple Axel. Neither does a new coach or neurotherapy.

#154Over time, Glenn changed how she lived, how she trained, how she prepared to compete, and how she understood what her own mind did under pressure.

#155The talent was there at 14.

#156Learning how to carry it all the way through a competition took much longer.

#157Brooke Glenn once described her sister's childhood in the simplest possible way:

#158Figure skating, figure skating, figure skating.

#159At 15, that life became so heavy Amber had to step away from skating altogether.

#160At 26, she's still an active elite skater. She's a three-time defending U.S. champion, a Grand Prix Final champion, and an Olympic gold medalist.

#161And in 2026, she also chose to join "Dancing with the Stars."

#162Glenn watched her partner, Pasha Pashkov, dance and admitted she was a little terrified.

#163On the ice, she's one of the experts now.

#164Here, she has to learn.

#165From the beginning.

#166At 14, Amber Glenn got good so early that other people started imagining the champion she was supposed to become. That expectation nearly crushed her, and reaching the top took another decade.

#167Now that she's finally there, one of the things she's chosen isn't another chance to prove how good she already is.

#168It's a chance to be a beginner again.

#169When 14-year-old Amber Glenn won the U.S. junior title, Sarah Hughes was the Olympic champion who called to congratulate her.

#170Hughes had taken her own Olympic gold in a way few people expected. At Salt Lake City in 2002, the bigger favorites were ahead of her going into the free skate. Then the 16-year-old Hughes delivered the skate that carried her all the way to gold.

#171Long before Glenn became an Olympian herself, that was the performance she kept replaying on DVD.

#172Why that one? </content>