Milan Cortina Games<\/a>, when Glenn answered a question about the political climate for the LGBTQ+ community under President Donald Trump.<\/p>\n\u201cI hope I can use my platform and voice throughout these Games to help people stay strong during these hard times,\u201d she said. \u201cA lot of people will say, \u2018You\u2019re just an athlete. Stick to your job. Shut up about politics.\u2019 But politics affect us all.\u201d<\/p>\n
Glenn probably wouldn\u2019t have taken such a bold stance a decade ago, when she nearly quit the sport.<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tFigure skater Amber Glenn once hid parts of herself to fit into a sport that prized perfection. Now, as an openly bisexual and pansexual athlete, she\u2019s using her platform to push for visibility, inclusion, and mental health awareness on and off the ice.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
But over the course of her career, she\u2019s\u00a0tackled head-on an eating disorder,\u00a0which is all-too common in the sport. She spent time in a mental health facility to get a handle on her depression. She learned to cope with ADHD. And she came to understand her sexuality; Glenn identifies as pansexual, meaning she is attracted to people regardless of sex or gender.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been through a lot,\u201d Glenn told The Associated Press. \u201cIt\u2019s taken many, many years to get to this point.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now, she has an Olympic gold medal from her Winter Games debut after helping\u00a0the U.S. defend its title\u00a0in the team event.<\/p>\n
\u201cI stepped away from the sport. I\u2019ve come back. At one point, I hated it. Whenever people would ask me, \u2018Oh, should my kids get into it?\u2019 I would be like, \u2018No, never,\u2019\u201d Glenn said. \u201cBut I\u2019ve seen the people around me grow, and how the environment of figure skating has changed, and how we\u2019re trying to change it. And in doing so, we\u2019ve created an environment I like to be in every day.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018I hated skating when I quit\u2019<\/p>\n
Liu is the only member of the U.S. women\u2019s team with any previous Olympics experience. But much like Glenn, she had come to loathe the sport by the time she finished sixth at the Beijing Games, so much so\u00a0that she quit entirely. She was 16 at the time.<\/p>\n
\u201cI really hated skating when I quit. Like, I really didn\u2019t like it,\u201d Liu said AP. \u201cI didn\u2019t care about competitions. I didn\u2019t care about places. I didn\u2019t care about skaters. I didn\u2019t care about my programs. I just wanted to, like, get away. I want nothing to do with that. I hated fame. I hated social media. I didn\u2019t like interviews. Like, I hated all of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
It took walking away for Liu to finally find herself.<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t2022 Olympian Mariah Bell discusses the return of Alysa Liu as the Olympic figure skater prepares for the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Games.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
The same kid who\u2019d get dropped off at the rink by her father in the morning and picked up at night, and who thirsted for friends her age while living and training alone in Colorado, began to explore: Liu climbed to the base camp of Mt. Everest, ticked off items on her ever-growing bucket list, and enrolled at UCLA to study, perhaps fittingly, psychology.<\/p>\n
\u201cI learned so much. Met so many new people,\u201d Liu said. \u201cI had to exercise my free will and push myself in different ways.\u201d<\/p>\n
She began\u00a0contemplating a comeback\u00a0two years ago, after she went skiing and experienced an adrenaline rush unlike anything she\u2019d felt since hanging up the skates. Liu didn\u2019t know where it would lead \u2014 certainly not the first world title for an American since Kimmie Meissner in 2006, and definitely not another Winter Games \u2014 but she knew that she loved the feeling of skating again.<\/p>\n
Everything in Liu\u2019s life has meaning now, including the striking horizontal stripes in her hair. They\u2019re meant to represent the growth rings of a tree. There are three of them at present, and like a tree, Liu plans to add another ring each year.<\/p>\n
\u201cI used to feel like a puppet or a canvas that other people were using,\u201d she said. \u201cNow I do things for myself.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018They have no idea what you\u2019re actually like\u2019<\/p>\n
Levito has always admired Russian skater Evgenia Medvedeva, perhaps the\u00a0most dominant women\u2019s skater\u00a0of the mid-2000s, who was heavily favored to win gold at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games but wound up with the silver medal instead.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was just so pretty. I just wanted to have that angelic energy that I feel like she has,\u201d Levito told the AP. \u201cAmber and Alysa have their distinct style, and she was more like me. My style is, I don\u2019t know, put together. I don\u2019t know how to word it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe ice princess image,\u201d Levito said, after a long pause, \u201cwhich is silly to say.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mostly because it is just that \u2014 an image.<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tU.S. figure skater Isabeau Levito says she is having the best time in the Olympic village and that she can’t be evicted.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Yes, there is a sense of purity surrounding Levito, whose mother, Chiara, immigrated to the U.S. from Milan three decades ago, and whose grandmother still lives in\u00a0the host city of the Winter Games. But pull her away from the TV cameras, photographers and the prying eyes of the world, and her sarcastic-bordering-on-vulgar sense of humor bubbles to the surface.<\/p>\n
At last month\u2019s U.S. Figure Skating Championships, Levito was asked her favorite quality in Liu, who was sitting beside her. \u201cI want to say something but I won\u2019t,\u201d Levito said, before succumbing to a little prodding: \u201cShe keeps the hoes on their toes,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s so funny,\u201d Levito said later, reflecting on that day. \u201cThe internet is like, \u2018Our Isabeau is not a baby anymore,\u2019 when they have no idea what you\u2019re actually like. I just don\u2019t want to say the wrong things in front of the media.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tHere are five things to know about American figure skater Isabeau Levito.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
So, Levito plays it safe. She wears a sort of mask for the public, projecting the image she thinks people want to see.<\/p>\n
Much like Glenn and Liu have people who can relate to them, there are a whole lot of people who can relate to that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The trio of U.S. women targeting Olympic figure skating gold Tuesday night are not the dainty ice princesses…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":135420,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[29209,29241,9,11,10],"class_list":{"0":"post-135419","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-2026-milan-cortina-olympics","9":"tag-figure-skating","10":"tag-new-york","11":"tag-new-york-headlines","12":"tag-new-york-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135419"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135419\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/135420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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