Amber Glenn delivers a true redemption story at Winter Olympics

USA's Amber Glenn competes in the figure skating women's single free skating final during the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games at Milano Ice Skating Arena in Milan on February 19, 2026. (Photo by Antonin THUILLIER / AFP via Getty Images) | AFP via Getty Images Seven minutes. Seven minutes every four years to show the world what you can do. That is the life of a figure skater.

To be sure, there are competitions beyond the Winter Olympics. World Championships, National Championships, and more. But every four years the eyes of the world focus on the skaters on the eyes, and those athletes have just even minutes to showcase everything they have been working on while the world was not watching.

Three minutes in a short program and, if you are lucky enough to advance, four more in the free skate. For all but a few seconds in Tuesday’s short program, Amber Glenn was perfect. For one blink of an eye she was not, and that may have cost her a gold medal, as she finished fifth, and that gold went to Team USA’s Alysa Liu But without question, she will leave Italy a champion.

Glenn’s journey to this moment began well before she arrived in Italy. She burst onto the United States skating scene as a teenager, making her senior-level debut at the 2015 U.S Championships at just 15 years old. She finished 13th. But then, her journey took a turn. Glenn was battling depression, anxiety, and an eating disorder, and struggling with her sexuality.

She decided to step away from the ice, and entered a facility for inpatient treatment. “I didn’t want to be on this Earth anymore,” Glenn said of that time in her life. The facility helped somewhat, but what also helped was returning to the ice to train alongside Timothy LeDuc, the first out, nonbinary Winter Olympian. Training alongside LeDuc helped Glenn find herself, and return to the ice a more confident skater.

Addressing her own sexuality, as she did in 2019 when she identified herself as bisexual and pansexual, also helped her along the path to this moment. “I was scared that I’d be looked at as less feminine, less graceful or something like that,” she said. “But I realized if we’re ever going to get past that worry someone has to do it,” Glenn said.

“Someone has to break that mold and break that stereotype in order for the next person who comes out not to be afraid of that because they saw that it didn’t affect me, or if it did, then I was able to move past it.” Along the way, Glenn also leaned into various methods of dealing with her anxiety and mental health struggles, including neurofeedback , which she has credited with easing the “fight or flight” response she feels when anxiety spikes.

“It’s really helped me especially control that fight or flight state that we get into when we have adrenaline and we have nerves,” she said. Glenn missed out on the 2022 Winter Olympics, as a positive COVID-19 test in the runup to the Games cost her a chance to try and make the team. But what followed was an incredible string of performances, culminating in her third consecutive national championship in St.

Louis this January. She headed to Italy as one of the favorites for gold. And with a triple Axel in her arsenal, she had a chance to take a big step forward towards that goal on Tuesday. The Axel is the toughest jump to execute in figure skating. It is the only jump where skaters take off facing forward, and because of that the athletes are required to executed an extra half-turn along the way.

Because of that level of difficulty, the triple Axel carries a five-point bonus in figure skating over a double Axel. Skaters who can land it are at a significant advantage over their rivals. Only two skaters had the triple Axel in their programs on Tuesday night, Ami Nakai from Japan, who was leading when Glenn took the ice, and Glenn herself.