When Amber Glenn was 10 years old, skating to "Live and Let Die" at a competition, a judge told her to tone it down. She was too exuberant. Too much energy. Not ladylike enough.

She is 26 years old now. She is a three-time U.S. national champion — the first woman to win three consecutive titles since Michelle Kwan did it in 2003-2005. She is the 2024-25 Grand Prix Final champion. She is the first openly LGBTQ+ woman in U.S. Olympic singles figure skating history. She is the oldest American woman to make the Olympic figure skating team in nearly a century.

And she is still not toning it down.

The Mall Rink in Plano

Glenn was born on October 28, 1999, in Plano, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. Her father Richard is a police officer. Her mother Cathlene is a fitness instructor. She has a younger sister named Brooke. Nobody in the family had a sports background.

At five years old, Cathlene took Amber to an ice rink inside the Stonebriar Centre Mall to escape the Texas heat. Glenn was hooked immediately. She started skating at the mall rink. Watching Sarah Hughes win the 2002 Olympic gold medal on TV cemented it — she wanted to compete.

The costs were staggering. Figure skating at the elite level runs $75,000 to $100,000 per year. Richard worked up to 30 hours of overtime per week, plus side jobs doing security at hospitals and movie theaters. Cathlene worked at the rink and served as a nanny for Glenn's coach to get discounted lessons. They scoured eBay for secondhand skates.

Glenn progressed fast. She landed her first single axel at six. By eleven, she had landed every triple jump except the axel. She was homeschooled from second grade through most of high school to accommodate the training schedule. She won the 2014 U.S. Junior Championship and earned bronze at two Junior Grand Prix events.

Then everything unraveled.

The Crisis

As Glenn moved from the junior to senior ranks, the pressure compounded in ways she wasn't equipped to handle. In a judged sport where appearance, body shape, and costumes are all scrutinized, Glenn internalized the criticism. She began struggling with depression, anxiety, an eating disorder, and what she would later learn was ADHD.

In late 2015, at 16, Glenn reached what she describes as a "very dark place." A close friend noticed how much she was struggling and contacted her parents. Glenn entered an inpatient mental health facility for six days. She doesn't remember much from her time there, except that she never saw the sun.

She left skating for eight months. Her psychiatrist had recommended she step away from the sport entirely. It was the longest she'd ever been off the ice in her ten-year career. She didn't know if she'd come back.

She came back.

The Long Climb

Glenn resumed training in 2016 with new coaches, Ann Brumbaugh and Ben Shroats, in McKinney, Texas. The recovery was slow. She finished eighth at the 2017 and 2018 U.S. Championships. She was nowhere near the top of the sport. But she was building something more important than results — she was building a relationship with skating that wasn't going to destroy her.

In 2019, she came out publicly as bisexual and pansexual. At the time, she was growing up in Texas and had felt isolated as a young girl when her peers were going "boy crazy" and she was having crushes on girls. Coming out was a turning point. She stopped trying to fit the mold of what she thought a figure skater was supposed to look like, act like, and be.

The injuries, though, kept coming. In 2020, she fractured her orbital bone and sustained a severe concussion after passing out during cryotherapy. She tested positive for COVID-19 right before the 2022 U.S. Championships — the Olympic selection event — and missed her chance to make the Beijing team. In 2023, she suffered a second severe concussion and broke her orbital bones again after an on-ice collision with another skater in practice. She says both concussions caused brain damage.

Through all of this, she moved to the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Training Center in Colorado Springs — her first time living outside Texas and away from her parents. She started working with coach Damon Allen. And something shifted.

The Breakout

The 2023-24 season was when everything came together. Glenn landed her first clean triple axel in senior international competition at the 2023 Skate America — becoming only the sixth American woman ever to do so, after attempting it (with falls or under-rotations) for nine years. At the 2024 Grand Prix de France, her triple axel in the short program helped her earn the highest score ever posted by an American woman.

She won the 2024 U.S. Championship — her first national title. Then the 2024-25 Grand Prix Final. Then a second and third consecutive national title. The woman who had spent a decade outside the top five in the U.S. was suddenly the most dominant American singles skater.

Her mantra, developed with Allen: "Believe and Breathe." During practice, she wears a heart-rate monitor and Allen tracks the readings rink-side. When the numbers spike, he calls her over for deep breaths. It's a system built for an athlete who knows her body and brain need active management — not because she's broken, but because she's learned how she works.

Milan: The Team Event and What's Next

Glenn's Olympic debut came on February 8, when she was substituted in for the women's free skate in the team event. It wasn't the dream performance she wanted — she had a shaky triple axel landing and a double-footed triple flip, finishing third in the segment behind Sakamoto and Gubanova. She was honest about it afterward.

She also acknowledged the guilt of not delivering her best when the team needed her: "I do feel guilty that I could be the reason that we don't win the gold." But Team USA won gold anyway — in part because Ilia Malinin delivered in the men's free skate that followed.

Now Glenn gets a reset. The women's individual short program is Tuesday, February 17. Her short program is set to "Like a Prayer" by Madonna. Her free skate features music by Audiomachine and CLANN, choreographed by Kaitlyn Weaver and Katherine Hill.

She, Liu, and teammate Isabeau Levito have nicknamed themselves the "Blade Angels" — a nod to Charlie's Angels. No American woman has won an individual Olympic figure skating medal since Sasha Cohen's silver in 2006. No American woman has won gold since Sarah Hughes in 2002.

Glenn, the girl from the mall rink whose parents worked overtime to afford her lessons, is one of the favorites to break that 20-year drought.