Winter Olympics 2026: The missed jump that devastated Amber Glenn

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MILAN — The worst thing about Amber Glenn’s routine wasn’t the fact she missed an element and torpedoed her score. The worst thing is that the tough part of her routine was already over when she did.

The reigning U.S. champion, Glenn arrived in Milan with hopes of winning an individual gold medal. Just two fateful seconds on the ice in the women’s short program likely destroyed that dream this year, and she knew it the moment it happened. 

Glenn had already executed the triple axel, a move so difficult only one other skater on the ice Tuesday achieved it — the night’s leader, Ami Nakai of Japan. The triple axel is a phenomenally difficult jump, one where the skater enters the jump going forward and ends it going backward, actually requiring 3½ turns. Glenn is one of the few female skaters powerful enough to do it, and her score on the element outranked Nakai’s. 

A few seconds later, though, Glenn attempted a triple loop, a jump she’s done thousands of times, a jump every skater on Tuesday’s program can perform. But for whatever reason — nerves, the ice, fate — she missed, only managing a double loop. And in the unyielding math of figure skating scoring, she earned no points whatsoever for the attempt. 

Had she landed the triple loop with even a routine score, she would have ended the program around fifth place, in position to challenge for a medal. As it is, the zero destroyed her score, dropping her all the way down to 13th, more than 11 points behind Nakai. 

Under the bleachers, watching on a television, Glenn’s fellow Blade Angel Alysa Liu gasped, knowing instantly what had happened. She watched, silently, as Glenn fought through the final 80 seconds of her short program, a tiny, brutal X scarring the graphic of Glenn’s scores on the screen. 

Glenn skates to Madonna’s “Like A Prayer,” an anthem of longing, belonging and belief. She’s honed the routine all season, using it to win the U.S. nationals in St. Louis last month. Madonna herself even recorded a short video to encourage Glenn to ride the song’s vibe to a gold medal. And her choreography was structured to do exactly that.  

When “Like a Prayer” kicks from its soaring choral section into its dance-floor percussion, Glenn begins the more performative element of her routine. But on Tuesday night, her eyes were already far away, her smile a frozen mask. She went through the motions of her routine as if on muscle memory, the crispness of her choreography long gone. 

Glenn spun to a stop on the Milano-Cortina logo, her right knee on the ice, her arms stretched out beside her. On a better night, it looks like she’s presenting herself to the world; Tuesday, it looked like she was reaching for help. 

As the audience all around her cheered and waved flags, as Ilia Malinin and Snoop Dogg tried to rally her from above, the tears began to flow. And by the time she reached the edge of the ice, her shoulders heaved with sadness, all the hopes and dreams and prayers of so many years now lost out there on the ice. 

“It's understandable,” Liu said of Glenn’s devastation. “She's super strong, so she can handle it.”

Glenn did a brief on-camera interview with NBC, her answers short and her face barely composed. She then walked past a gathering of reporters without speaking, the devastation visible on her face. 

“She's gone through so much and she works so freaking hard, like genuinely,” Liu said, a rueful, sympathetic smile on her face. “I just want her to be happy. That's genuinely all I want.”