How Figure Skater Amber Glenn Took Control of Her Life

Amber Glenn could not have imagined, even in the wildest scenario, that she would repeat as U.S. national champion three times in a row, the first woman to accomplish that feat since Michelle Kwan in 2000.

Watching Glenn skate at the championships with power and precision, nailing all of her jumps, including the triple axel—one of the hardest jumps women at the elite level perform—it’s hard to imagine the young woman she once was, filled with anxiety and self-doubt, constantly feeling unworthy, and lacking the confidence to believe she could reach the top ranks of skating, let alone make an Olympic team.

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But anyone who has followed Glenn’s story knows just how much work it has taken her to get to this point, not just on the ice but off. Gregarious by nature, Glenn has talked freely about her struggles with her mental health, which led her to leave competitive skating for a few months as a teen, but also motivated her to become a stronger and more consistent athlete, as well as her decision to come out as bisexual and pansexual. It is this journey as much as her performance on the ice that have endeared her to skating fans and will make her programs among the most anticipated at the Milano Cortina Olympics.

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In her first press conference as an Olympian in Milan, Glenn addressed the challenging situation facing the LGBTQ community in the U.S., saying, “It’s been a hard time for this community overall, and this Administration—it is the first time that we’ve had to come together as a community and fight for our human rights. And it’s not just affecting the queer community, but many others. I hope I can use my platform and my voice throughout these games to try and encourage people to stay strong in these hard times. I know that a lot of people say, ‘You’re just an athlete, stick to your job. Shut up about politics.’ But politics affects us all. It is something that I will not just be quiet about.”

Glenn began skating at the age of 5 in Texas, after trying soccer and finding that, as she puts it, “the heat was too much—I did not love it.” She grew up near three cousins, all girls, and her parents and aunt and uncle were looking for activities that she and her younger sister and cousins could do together. The cool ice rink appealed to Glenn, and she started with Learn to Skate lessons, where starting skaters are sectioned off by ability into segments of the ice separated by bright orange cones.

“I really loved the speed and skating to music,” she says, “and being able to learn new tricks.” Once Glenn got comfortable on skates, she was always looking over at the older skaters and scooting in their space to try what they were learning, “helmet, knee pads, and all,” she says.

By the time she was 8, she was going to junior nationals. Her father, a police sergeant, worked extra shifts to finance her lessons, and her mother spent all day at the rink with her, helping younger skaters, babysitting, and teaching off-ice classes. She progressed quickly, “then puberty and growing up happened and things got hard,” she says. “But I’m very resilient, and I still am, and eventually things worked out.”

But she was facing challenges deeper than mastering new jumps and increasingly intricate skating skills. Glenn was feeling more and more anxious about almost every aspect of skating, and the anxiety was fueled by the sport’s competitive structure, which pits athletes against each other in a constant cycle of comparisons. As participants in a judged sport, skaters are trained at a young age to learn that everything about them—their appearance, their body shape, their costumes, and their skating style—are open for criticism and praise. For young female skaters in particular, there is an ideal that they strive for, the image of the perfect ice princess without a single flaw.

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The pressure to meet that ideal began to weigh on Glenn, as did the lengths she knew her family was going to so that she could continue skating. “It made it even more important that the sacrifices that I was making and that my family was making produced results,” she says. “Knowing how much was going into this, and having that pressure on me from such a young age—I wanted it, but that’s a lot to ask of a kid.”

Competing at local competitions, she says, “felt like life or death.” And it didn’t help that her entire world was skating, so everyone around her fed off the same mentality of striving for perfection and never being satisfied. “That was our normal. Our coaches would pit us against each other, and at 10 years old, we were forced to have this competitiveness and comparison—it’s so toxic,” she says.

Glenn developed an eating disorder, and her anxiety worsened. She intuitively realized that she could not continue in such an unhealthy environment, but felt powerless to change. “I wouldn’t be able to skate,” she says. “I was miserable. I felt like I didn’t belong with the elite [skaters] but I also didn’t have the experience of being ‘normal’ either. A lot of my friends had gone off, started high school and were doing other things. And I was stuck here. I thought I wasn’t going anywhere and got into this severe depression where I didn’t want to keep living—I didn’t want to do anything.”

Glenn saw a psychiatrist who prescribed an antidepressant, but she didn’t have a good reaction to the medication. She wasn’t eating properly or sleeping well either, which further aggravated her fragile mental state. It was one of Glenn’s closest friends who realized her friend was drowning and spoke to Glenn’s parents.

“It did come as a shock to my parents,” Glenn says. “They thought it was just me stressing out over skating, when it was a lot more than that.” Even then Glenn was reluctant to admit that she needed help, since, she says, “growing up in Texas, there wasn’t mental health. It just wasn’t a thing. It was ‘Stop crying, get up, and do your job.’ It couldn’t be more different now. But in 2015, it wasn’t really thought of much.”

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Glenn’s doctor wanted to switch medications, and since she hadn’t responded well to the previous one, suggested she spend a week in an inpatient facility to monitor her reaction. “I was kind of in shock and relieved, because I was finally being seen,” she says. “But it was hard because it meant I had to take a step away from skating and stop everything I was doing, and that was all I knew. I didn’t know if I would ever come back to skating—it was such a scary step to take.”

In retrospect, Glenn says taking that step has been a critical part of her recovery and her ability to return to skating as a better athlete and stronger person. It also helped her to put her struggles in perspective and prioritize what was meaningful and fulfilling to her. “It was a wake-up call, a reality check for me,” she says. At the facility, she met people dealing with “some intense things and here I was worrying about figure skating. It’s not that my problems or struggles are any less than anyone else’s, but I realized that ‘OK, even if I come out of here and never skate again, I know I have the opportunity to still make a good life for myself.’ It got me out of that spiral.”

She learned more coping mechanisms from group therapy and continued sessions with a sport psychologist, who focused on helping her rely on breathing and mental exercises for quieting the fight-or-flight response that set off her anxiety alarms. The sessions helped make her confident enough to return to the ice in 2016, but this time on her own terms. 

In 2022 Glenn moved from Texas to Colorado Springs, Colo., to train at the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Training Center with Damon Allen. “Everyone always said, ‘You have so much potential,’ so I thought, ‘Let’s give it one last shot … let me see what happens when I just go all in,’” she says.

It was the first time Glenn had lived away from her parents, and the move also signified her desire to shape her own skating career. “She was the one driving the engine,” says Allen. “Our first talk was about her saying, ‘I don’t know if I want to skate one more year, or four more years, but I definitely don’t want to finish my skating career with the nationals I just had [where she finished 13th]. If I skate one more year and am successful, and I feel good about it, and I decide to walk away, I’m fine with that.’”

The new rink, which provided a more positive and supportive environment, gave Glenn a fresh start, and after that first year, she moved up in the rankings at international competitions. “We’re going for it, let’s keep going,” she told Allen.

But old habits die hard, and she still found herself spiraling into adrenalin-fueled frenzies, especially during competitions. Allen noticed that when Glenn made a mistake, the remainder of her routine would derail. Part of that, she says, was because “I was in constant fight-or-flight mode. On ice during a competition, I was amped up so the first minute I’m amazing, I’m doing incredible stuff and the adrenalin is giving me superpowers. Then I get to a minute and a half, and now I’m dead tired, because I can only keep it up so long.”

Glenn knew she needed a way to help her dial down her racing brain and turned to neurofeedback. “It’s like going to the gym but for your brain,” she says of the training, in which her brain activity is recorded while she is doing different things, from watching videos of competitions she’s done to doing relaxation exercises so she can better regulate the intensity of her brain activity. “It’s teaching me how to control my brain, usually with my breath and by relaxing my body, to get into a flow state, a good place,” she says.

Glenn says it’s no coincidence that some of her strongest results on the ice happened after she began using neurofeedback techniques in the spring of 2024. “It’s been a game changer,” says Allen. That season, she was undefeated through all of her competitions including the U.S. championships, where she won her second title, and this season, in addition to winning her third consecutive national championship, she earned gold and silver at her Grand Prix series events.

A critical part of her new strategy is her mantra of “Believe and Breathe,” a reminder to trust her training and herself, and to take deep breaths to calm any nerves that may flare up. During practice, Glenn wears a heart-rate monitor and Allen keeps the reader by the boards so he can track how high her levels creep. When the reading goes up, Allen calls her over and reminds her to take a few deep breaths.

As Glenn has taken more control of her life, she’s also grown more accepting of who she is. The first openly LGBTQ+ U.S. female figure-skating champion and first queer female skater to represent the U.S. at an Olympics, she recalls how isolating it was to feel different from other girls growing up in Texas when she was 11 or 12 and they were going “boy crazy and I was having a crush on a girl.” She remembers freezing when she had to fill out her sexuality at the inpatient facility, not sure of how to answer.

Eventually, she came out to her younger sister. “She was very accepting and even was my wing woman,” she says. Still, Glenn remained anxious about how her sexuality would be perceived in her skating world, so it took time before she fully embraced it. Ultimately, she decided to use the platform she had to break confining barriers that constrain skaters’ expression of their sexual identity. “I thought, ‘You know what, I’m going to step into this role, and if I keep competing and I’m not at the top, that’s OK,’” she says. “I was sick feeling that I was betraying myself in trying to be what was expected of female skaters and that was not who I was. With coming out, I felt I was able to lean into my strengths more. I’m a strong athlete, I have muscles, and I’m going to skate to songs I enjoy. I felt I was able to embrace all that once I came out. If that’s all that came out of my skating—just seeing someone like me being represented in skating–then placements be damned, medals be damned, I’m happy with what little stuff I’m able to do in the community.”

Glenn will soon have an even bigger platform for both her skills and her message as she makes her Olympic debut as a medal contender in Milan. She is one of only two women skaters expected to include a triple axel in their programs. Glenn began learning the jump during COVID, when she and other athletes were forced to spend less time on the ice. Noticing that the skaters from Japan and Russia were mastering the jump, which pays off in more points that are critical for reaching the podium, Glenn decided she would need it in her repertoire if she wanted to be competitive again. She became obsessed with dissecting every aspect of the technique—the takeoff, the rotations, the landing, and the body positions she needed to pull them off. “I thought, if I am going to try to get in shape to accomplish this and gain the strength and technique I need to work toward that goal, then now is the time,” she says. She studied videos of skaters like Elizaveta Tuktamysheva from Russia, timed how long they remained in the air to complete the rotations, and focused on building her core and leg strength. 

Once she was back on the ice, it took about two months before she could almost pull off the three and a half rotations she needed. But after another couple of weeks, she landed it for the first time. “I was lucky that I captured it on video,” she says. “I was a little dot on the screen, because I was filming myself. When I did it, I stood there in shock. I was so surprised. Then all my training mates and coaches ran up and gave me a big hug. But I was like, ‘Wait, let me try it again to make sure it wasn’t a fluke.’” She landed the jump a few more times that day.

It’s now “her most consistent element,” says Allen, and a signature of her programs, giving her an edge over competitors and putting her in the league of elite skaters that she used to think she wasn’t worthy of joining.

In Milan, Glenn will have her usual support team–her family, her sports psychologist, and her physical therapist–to ensure her appearances on Olympic ice feel just like any training session back home. “My strategy is trying to make her feel as close to being at her normal training facility mentally,” says Allen. Highly organized, Glenn keeps a log of her daily training sessions, including how many double and triple axels she performs. And she is already planning her schedule for the 20 or so days she will be in Milan. Recently, Glenn sent Allen a long text detailing where they will be each day, when her training session or competition days are, and what programs she plans to practice in each session.

“My reply test was all in uppercase: BREATHE,” says Allen. “It’s Amber’s world and I am just kind of living in it.”