America’s 14-year drought of girls’s determine skating Grand Prix champions ended Saturday when Amber Glenn overcame elite Japanese opponents to take first place.
Glenn received the primary girls’s singles remaining 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 completed second by means of sixth in that order. Glenn’s victory got here by a margin of simply 0.69 factors over Chiba.
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At 25, the Texan is the oldest Grand Prix Closing winner since Russia’s Irina Slutskaya received her fourth and remaining title in December 2004 at 26. It units Glenn up as a high contender on the world championships in Boston March 23-30, lower than a 12 months out from the 2026 Olympics.
There was a time in Glenn’s profession when it appeared she would obtain a feat like this a lot sooner. In 2014, she received the U.S. junior championships. However she stepped away from skating in 2015 over points with melancholy.
She returned later that 12 months however had one of many worst performances of her profession with a sixth-place end on the 2015 Autumn Traditional Worldwide. She has since referred to as the expertise “a catastrophe,” based on The Washington Publish.
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She took one other depart from the game after that and has since revealed that, throughout that point, she was instructed by docs to go away the game “indefinitely.” However she returned to coaching in early 2016. Glenn by no means fairly lived as much as her 2014 junior championship type in senior stage competitions after that.
In December 2019, Glenn introduced she was pansexual, which means she’s romantically drawn to folks no matter gender.
“The concern of not being accepted is a big battle for me,” she instructed Dallas Voice. “Being perceived as ‘only a part’ or ‘indecisive’ is a typical factor for bisexual/pansexual girls. I don’t wish to shove my sexuality in folks’s faces, however I additionally don’t wish to cover who I’m.”
Glenn cited the North Texas-based ice skating workforce of Ashley Cain-Gribble and her queer associate Timothy LeDuc as “function fashions” in her accepting her sexuality, based on Dallas Voice.
In an interview with Workforce USA in 2021, Glenn stated her expertise rising up as a determine skater launched her to homosexual stereotypes. She later stated she developed “crushes” on feminine skaters.
“Rising up in determine skating, the stereotype was at all times that the lads have been homosexual,” Glenn stated. “At 16, when my associates and coaching mates have been beginning to take a look at the alternative intercourse, I used to be crushing on each women and men.”
Glenn has solely been identified to have a romantic relationship with males’s determine skater Nathan Chen. The 2 dated in 2016, expressing their affection by means of Instagram posts.
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Gold medalist Amber Glenn of the USA poses with a medal in the course of the medal ceremony on the ISU Grand Prix of Determine Skating Closing — Grenoble at Patinoire Polesud Dec. 7, 2024, in Grenoble, France. (Daniela Porcelli/Worldwide Skating Union/Worldwide Skating Union)
“My love for you fashioned regularly. Your persona, your voice, your hair, your eyes, your humor, every thing. You’re the one individual I want to speak to after I’m having a foul day, the one individual I can depend on to not decide me. You’re my rock, my greatest good friend, and essentially the most wonderful boyfriend I may ask for,” she wrote to Chen in an Instagram submit.
Their relationship is believed to have led to 2017, and she or he got here out as pansexual two years after that. Glenn stated that she was afraid being brazenly pansexual “would have an effect on her scores” in an interview with NBC Sports activities in January.
It did not have an effect on her scores sufficient to maintain her from successful a historic medal Saturday.
Glenn is now in place to make her first Winter Olympics workforce.
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