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

MILAN — The rink at Enterprise Center in St. Louis glowed a deep indigo. A spotlight found Tenley Albright, the gold medal-winning skater at the 1956 Olympics in Cortina, sporting the same crimson jacket she’d worn at those games. This day, the official announcement of Team USA’s Milan-Cortina skaters, marked a ceremonial torch-passing, a union of generations, and Albright drew the honor of welcoming America’s newest 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, the cheers rolled as Albright continued, “she has just won her third national championship…”

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Then 26-year-old Amber Glenn stepped from behind a curtain, embraced Albright, stepped onto the ice … and skated into her future.

Once they stop falling, children smile when they skate. Why wouldn’t you? Gliding at high speed across the ice is a joyful feeling. Why not let the world know how you feel, the way Amber Glenn did when she was learning to skate in the Stonebriar Centre Mall in suburban Dallas?

“I was lucky enough to be in the Dallas-Fort Worth area,” Glenn said recently, crediting the Dallas Stars with a role in her origin. “We were able to have many ice rinks built after they won [the Stanley Cup] in ‘99 and that really helped fortify a large skating community in Texas.”

Smiling is fine for the mall, but for competition, well … judges can frown on skaters’ smiles. The sport is undergoing a slow metamorphosis, but some of the old ways still persist: too much joy, too much exuberance unbalances the performance in the eyes of some judges.

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

Glenn’s mother Cathlene recalled judges suggesting ways for Glenn to fit the “Ice Princess” mold: cut 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 devoted her entire childhood to skating, home-schooling in order to focus more on the ice, the pressure and the walls around her were growing.

But Glenn kept skating, and more importantly for her career, kept winning. As her father, a policeman, took on overtime shifts and her parents scoured eBay for secondhand skates, she piled up victory after victory, locally, nationally and internationally. She claimed bronze in the 2013 ISU Junior Grand Prix in the Czech Republic, then won the U.S. Figure Skating Championships’ junior title the next year.

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Still, despite the victories, Glenn struggled with a range of mental-health challenges throughout the 2010s, culminating in her most challenging battle at age 15.

“I had a mental-health crisis, and I had to stop absolutely everything,” she says. “I left skating for a while not knowing if I’d return or not, and had to prioritize surviving and making it to the next day for quite a while there. And it took many years to get to a place where I could healthily skate again.”

As she did, she began claiming parts of herself she’d given away. In 2019, she began skating to Madilyn’s cover of Papa Roach’s “Scars,” a song that’s a long way lyrically from the saccharine orchestral music that generally accompanies skating routines.

Our scars remind us that the past is real
I tear my heart open 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 the Voice. “Being perceived as [going through] ‘just a phase’ or ‘indecisive’ is a common thing for bisexual/pansexual women. I don’t want to shove my sexuality in people’s faces, but I also don’t want to hide who I am.”

“I thought, Oh, I’m just gonna kind of mention it in an article that was about someone else,” Glenn recalled recently. “It was about my training mates. And I thought, Okay, this is my little baby step, and barely anyone’s going to see it. It was a local newspaper. Yeah … it did not stay local.”

Glenn’s announcement sent shockwaves through the skating community, but from her very first event following the interview, she began seeing Pride flags in the stands. Supporters bring flags to every competition, every exhibition, right up to the U.S. Championships in St. Louis last month.

“It wasn’t something I was necessarily prepared for, but I was comfortable enough with my friends and family, and that’s all I really cared about,” she says. “And if people had an issue with it, then they had an issue 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 for our sport, the way that she’s so open and vulnerable about her mental-health issues and struggles,” says Olympic gold medalist and NBC commentator Tara Lipinski, “and how she overcomes the doubts and the pressure that she faces.”

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Out and honest about her struggles, Glenn appeared on a direct trajectory toward the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing. But she tested positive for Covid just before the 2022 U.S. championships, costing her a spot on the team. The next year, she suffered her second concussion and broken orbital bones … and still refused to give up and give in.

Glenn won the 2024 U.S. championships, then repeated the feat again 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’s the eldest of the new “Big Three,” along with Alysa Liu and Isabeau Levito, both of whom won national championships at a much younger age than Glenn.

Ranked third overall in the world, Glenn stands as one of the best bets to end American women’s long Olympic skating medal drought. No American woman has medaled in the Olympics’ figure skating singles 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 how much she’s been through,” says Olympian and NBC commentator Johnny Weir. “She really wears her heart on her sleeve when she performs, which makes it very welcoming to watch her.”

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Her openness about her mental struggles has, ironically enough, allowed her to redirect her attention to her performances. “Honestly, when I’m out there competing, I’m thinking about what I’m doing in that moment, because if I don’t, then I’m going to trip and fall on my face,” she says. “So I’ve got to think about what I’m doing in that moment, remembering to breathe, and just trying to enjoy the moment, because it is over fast.”

At that official Olympic announcement in January, after embracing Albright, Glenn skated an exhibition program to Lady Gaga’s version of “That’s Life,” a selection that surely was no coincidence. Glenn skated, long blond hair flowing free, as lines like “Each time I find myself flat on my face / I pick myself 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 that I’d still be skating at 26. I thought I’d be long done by now,” Glenn says. “I just keep doing it because I love it, and I’m getting better and better each passing day.”

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