Amber Glenn’s face revealed the magnitude, even as the women’s finalists warmed up on the home ice of the St. Louis Blues. Her high-beam eyes aglow. Her smile straightened by the intensity. Her lips moved only to whisper to herself. The crowd doting on her as she skated by, in her sparkly navy blue costume, may as well have been invisible as Glenn focused.

She had every reason to be loose. Her short program at the U.S. championships last month set a national record. Her previous excellence had already secured her a spot in Milan. U.S. Figure Skating, the national governing body, decides who goes instead of leaving it to the results of that year’s nationals. Glenn also won the previous two U.S. championships, so she’s been on this stage, under that weight, before.

But anxiety doesn’t read the resume. And competitive edge comes with tunnel vision. This free skate before her in early January mattered most, which meant she felt every ounce of pressure. Her expression declared its presence.

“I felt like I was gonna throw up,” Glenn said after notching the highest-scoring free skate of her life and capturing a third consecutive national championship.

Also revealed, in the same expression: Glenn’s freedom.

She had battled stomach issues all day, so much so that she felt relief after getting through the warmup. Everyone could see her gutting it out, trying to “get in touch with my body and get a feel of the ice.” That inward struggle made it to the surface because Glenn no longer bothers with charades. She discarded the notion of hiding. Rejected the sport’s microaggressions.

As a result, her career took off. She enters these Winter Games as a serious medal contender. The culmination of a one-of-a-kind journey that’s taken her from an ice rink in a Texas mall to a pursuit of gold in Milan. She reaches this peak at 26, a proverbial auntie in a sport full of teenagers. For the longest time, this level didn’t seem to be part of her story.

Glenn has spent much of her career in a wide, frustrating space in figure skating. That place where talent is undeniable but transcendence keeps its distance. Glenn could always be described as a great skater. Pretty good skaters don’t win junior national championships at 14. But this sport reserves its greatest rewards for the exceptional while demanding so much that exceptional seems the only acceptable payoff.

Glenn landed the hard jumps, trained through the pain, endured the anvil that is expectations, year after year, yet got close enough to the summit only to confirm she didn’t reach it.

Figure skating is ruthless that way. It doesn’t just measure what skaters can do, it penalizes what they didn’t. It constantly reminds them of perfection not attained. For Glenn, the imperfection lay with her identity. The ceiling thwarting her exceptional talent originated from the constraints of tradition. She tried. Softened her edges, so to speak. Sharpened her skating. The difference between great and the best in figure skating exists in the margins, often small enough to be microscopic.

But while adding a clean triple axel to her repertoire in 2023 elevated her to another level, Glenn’s real elevation came from within. When she stopped expending energy on concealing her intensity, her aura, her truth.

“I didn’t fit the mold, and I tried so hard to fit into it,” Glenn said. “And once I accepted that just wasn’t going to happen, honestly, I started to kind of lean into it a bit more. I just let myself be me. And through that, I was able to find a new, unique shape that hadn’t been taken before.”

That new shape is unique indeed. The Texas roots. The delayed ascent. The triple axel she added during the pandemic. The coming out. The protective spirit she hovers over the other skaters. Based on tradition, she arrived late to this precipice. But, truly, Glenn is on time. Her time.

Now, she makes her Olympic debut as a favorite to end an American drought. The U.S. women haven’t won a medal since Sasha Cohen’s silver in 2006. The last American gold medalist was Sarah Hughes in 2002.

If Glenn wins gold, she’d be the oldest women’s Olympic champ since Madge Syers in 1908, back when figure skating took place in the Summer Games.

Of the 78 medals awarded all-time in the women’s singles competition at the Olympics, 17 have been won by women 23 and older. Eight of those medalists were at least 25 years old, with only three coming in the last 100 years. The average age of Winter Olympic gold medalists in women’s singles: 19.5 years old.

Glenn, however, found her stride past the prescribed prime. Because liberation worked out to be a competitive advantage. Because authenticity weighs less than facades.

The same skater who long hovered at the foothill of elite finally began to look it, be it, because she stopped editing herself. And instead found perfection in her imperfections. Now she’s an ambassador in a sport relishing a new era. A sport growing to appreciate individuality rather than squeezing it out.

“And some people love it,” Glenn said. “Some people think it’s a bit too much for figure skating. But who are they to judge? I’m figure skating. Obviously, it works. And if that’s not your preference, then don’t watch. I’m not forcing you to like what I’m doing, but I’m doing it anyways.”

North Texas isn’t an obvious figure skating pipeline. But as in the sport, timing is critical. The Dallas Stars’ trip to the Western Conference finals in 1998, followed by consecutive appearances in the Stanley Cup Final, winning it all in 1999, helped spark a boom in ice rinks in Texas.

One of those opened in 2000 at the Stonebriar Centre. It lasted 13 years at the Frisco, Texas, mall. The NHL-sized rink, which hosted hockey practices and public skating near a California Pizza Kitchen, lost out to retail shops in Stonebriar’s renovation. But before it became a Forever 21 or whatever, the rink inspired a girl from nearby Plano, sparking the passion of an Olympian.

“That really helped fortify a large skating community in Texas,” Glenn said. “… I’m really lucky that I got into it at a young age in Texas.”

Back then, the sport for Glenn wasn’t about medals and scores and degrees of difficulty. It was about being with her sister and cousins. The way the movement felt like gliding. The way fantastical became tangible.

Glenn, who started skating as a 5-year-old, took to the ice like ham to burger. Even as a third-grader, her athleticism caught the attention of coaches. She started competing nationally. She developed rapidly as a figure skater. Before middle school, she could nail five of the sport’s six types of triple jumps. The only one she couldn’t — yet — was the triple axel. She became the U.S. junior champion at 14.

But the low point came soon.

“I didn’t want to be on this earth anymore,” Glenn said.

At about 16 years old, per her timeline, she battled depression, anxiety and an eating disorder. The pressure of being a prodigy, from within and without, proved too much. It landed Glenn in a mental health facility.

She withdrew from everything, returning to her source of security and peace. Her family, her friends and the relationships that maintained significance when the blades came off. She found the person again, the one valuable beyond her potential.

And later — when the brutality ever present in this sport of beauty extracted its pound of flesh from Glenn — she was equipped to deal with professional adversity.

In 2021, at 21 years old, she medaled at the U.S. championships, finishing second. It established Glenn as a serious hopeful for the 2022 Winter Games. In the next U.S. championships, though, she caught COVID, forcing her to withdraw from the competition before her free skate. At 22, she was passed over for an Olympic spot, named an alternate.

She called it her professional low point. But her previous suffering taught her to handle the disappointment.

“And it took just completely stripping down to just survive every day,” Glenn said. “Just wake up and make it to the next day. It’s taken a decade to get to where I am now. But I’m grateful to even be here and to be able to live out this dream after having suffered for a while. I still am working on my mental health. It’s something that’s with you forever.”

In 2024, she finished 10th at the world championships after several falls in her free skate. In 2025, after winning a second consecutive U.S. championship, she fell in the short program of the world championships. It was enough to keep her off the podium.

Still, Glenn got better and stronger as she got older. Each disappointment seemed to unlock more of her resolve. Her resilience required answers, and the answers she acquired produced wisdom. And wisdom helps her maximize her combination of experience and athleticism.

The battle with Glenn is never just about gravity and the math of rotations. But with her brain and her psychology. Years of high-level skating leave her dealing with neuropathy and the lingering effects of multiple concussions. Injuries that don’t always announce themselves with visible scars but quietly impact how the body responds to the stress of their profession. Glenn described how adrenaline can hijack her system, pushing her into a constant fight-or-flight state. Spiked heart rates. Dulled sensations. Command slipping away.

She learned how to regulate her intensity so it wouldn’t consume her halfway through a program. Glenn doesn’t need to get hyped before a skate, but to harness.

It forced her to delve deeper into her own brain and nervous system. Working with a sports psychologist, she turned to neurofeedback — a therapy that trains the brain to improve its performance.

“If I suppress it,” Glenn explained, “I’m gonna go out there and I’m just gonna like fall over. I have to have some sort of adrenaline and excitement to be able to go and do these jumps that are done in less than a second. But if I’m too excited and I get to about a minute and a half … I can’t feel my legs, no matter how much physical training I’ve done. So finding that perfect balance, the zone, has been absolutely essential, and I’m still looking for it.”

After winning her third consecutive U.S. title last month, Glenn stepped to the podium with the silver and bronze medalists, Alysa Liu and Isabeau Levito. Before they sat down to answer questions, Glenn had a command. She lacquered in enough warmth to make it feel like a great idea. She orchestrated a picture with them on the podium.

With their happiness to oblige evident on their faces, Liu and Levito posed on both sides of Glenn. The big sis. The fun aunt. The standard bearer.

Per the cliche of the sport, they should have beef. Their competitiveness should resemble animosity, and Glenn should draw their ire. The old head who won’t step aside.

But it takes two seconds to see how much they love Glenn. The new faces of the sport, in this new generation of figure skaters, promote congeniality much more than cutthroat competitiveness.

In St. Louis, after notching a program that vaulted her to first place, Liu sat and watched Glenn’s skate. Not in the back on a TV screen but live, rinkside. Liu smiled. She leaned on the jumps, as if to help Glenn rotate. Either she’s a great actress, or she was rooting.

“She’s just like a big sister to me,” Liu said. “I really just see her as like one of my friends and truly one of my teammates.”

It’s a spirit Glenn brings. That kind of unity doesn’t happen organically. Glenn knows too much, has been through too much, to not look at her fellow skaters and see them. Really see them. Because she knows the benefits, finally, of being really seen.

After wrestling with coming out as bisexual and pansexual, she decided she’d take a baby step by casually mentioning her orientation in a local article about training mates in 2019. If she slipped it in casually, she thought, the response would match her understated delivery. It became international news overnight. The baby step became a long jump.

The attention was a lot to process. But the clarity was unmistakable. No longer shoehorning into skates never made for her, the next version of someone else’s ideal.

“Eventually, I realized, if I’m gonna keep doing this, I want to at least do it as me,” Glenn said. “I’m going to be at the top anyway, so I might as well do it as myself. And in doing so, I ended up making it to the top. So I learned a lot, and I think that being an advocate for the queer community and for mental health is one of the reasons why I keep going and being able to be that person who has this platform. … I came out, and I’ve had success, and that motivates me to keep having success. ”

The success didn’t come all at once. Glenn wasn’t a superstar yet when she came out. Just a great skater finding her way, revealing her truth, leaving it all on the ice. Oddly enough, she learned a valuable lesson. People responded with an embrace. In a sport obsessed with flawlessness, Glenn appealed with genuineness. Perfection, she learned, belonged in mythology. The chase for it is worthy, but grace must follow.

Glenn gives it to herself. She showers it on others.

For the woman once knocked for her hard appearance on the ice, she’s as mushy as they come about skaters. She knows the harshness of their sport and bears the scars from her love of figure skating. Her survival inspired camaraderie. Her struggle produced appreciation.

Because she’s still here, her best self, long after the sport’s usual expiration date. The Olympic gold medalist from eight years ago, Russia’s Alina Zagitova, is three years younger than Glenn.

Because liberation is rejuvenating.

Today, Glenn stands on the cusp of becoming a legend. Rooted in her own skin, embraced by the next generation, she isn’t just skating toward history. She’s modeling what it looks like to arrive there whole.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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