Texas native Amber Glenn wins biggest US women's figure skating title in 14 years, beating Japan's stars
America's 14-year drought of women's figure skating Grand Prix champions ended Saturday when Amber Glenn overcame elite Japanese opponents to take first place.
Glenn won the first women's singles final gold medal for the U.S. since 2010.
She held off Japan's Mone Chiba, Hana Yoshida, Kaori Sakamoto, Rino Matsuike and Wakaba Higuchi, who finished second through sixth in that order. Glenn's victory came by a margin of just 0.69 points over Chiba.
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At 25, the Texan is the oldest Grand Prix Final winner since Russia’s Irina Slutskaya won her fourth and final title in December 2004 at 26. It sets Glenn up as a top contender at the world championships in Boston March 23-30, less than a year out from the 2026 Olympics.
There was a time in Glenn's career when it appeared she would achieve a feat like this much sooner. In 2014, she won the U.S. junior championships. But she stepped away from skating in 2015 over issues with depression.
She returned later that year but had one of the worst performances of her career with a sixth-place finish at the 2015 Autumn Classic International. She has since called the experience "a disaster," according to The Washington Post.
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She took another leave from the sport after that and has since revealed that, during that time, she was told by doctors to leave the sport "indefinitely." But she returned to training in early 2016. Glenn never quite lived up to her 2014 junior championship form in senior level competitions after that.
In December 2019, Glenn announced she was pansexual, meaning she's romantically attracted to people regardless of gender.
"The fear of not being accepted is a huge struggle for me," she told Dallas Voice. "Being perceived as ‘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."
Glenn cited the North Texas-based ice skating team of Ashley Cain-Gribble and her queer partner Timothy LeDuc as "role models" in her accepting her sexuality, according to Dallas Voice.
In an interview with Team USA in 2021, Glenn said her experience growing up as a figure skater introduced her to gay stereotypes. She later said she developed "crushes" on female skaters.
"Growing up in figure skating, the stereotype was always that the men were gay," Glenn said. "At 16, when my friends and training mates were starting to look at the opposite sex, I was crushing on both males and females."
Glenn has only been known to have a romantic relationship with men's figure skater Nathan Chen. The two dated in 2016, expressing their affection through Instagram posts.
"My love for you formed gradually. Your personality, your voice, your hair, your eyes, your humor, everything. You’re the one person I need to talk to when I’m having a bad day, the one person I can rely on to not judge me. You’re my rock, my best friend, and the most amazing boyfriend I could ask for," she wrote to Chen in an Instagram post.
Their relationship is believed to have ended in 2017, and she came out as pansexual two years after that. Glenn said that she was afraid being openly pansexual "would affect her scores" in an interview with NBC Sports in January.
"When I came out initially, I was terrified. I was scared it would affect my scores or something," she told the ouglet.
It didn't affect her scores enough to keep her from winning a historic medal Saturday.
Glenn is now in position to make her first Winter Olympics team.
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