MILAN (AP) — The trio of U.S. women targeting Olympic figure skating gold Tuesday night are not the dainty ice princesses of yesteryear.
There’s Amber Glenn, a 26-year-old powerhouse and LGBTQ+ rights activist whose career took off just when most figure skaters are contemplating retirement. The three-time and reigning U.S. champion’s unvarnished opinion on everything from politics to the trading card game “Magic: The Gathering” have made her a polarizing figure at the Milan Cortina Games.
Then there’s Alysa Liu, the one-time phenom who retired at 16 only to launch a comeback that resulted in the first world title for an American woman in nearly two decades. Liu’s blond-and-brunette striped hair, prominent frenulum piercing and nonconformist aura have made the 20-year-old a hero of the alt, punk and emo crowd.
And there’s Isabeau Levito, perhaps the closest thing to the innocent image of teen predecessors like Tara Lipinski and Sarah Hughes, right up until you get the 18-year-old away from the cameras, and her searing wit and biting sarcasm shine through.
They’ve dubbed themselves the “Blade Angels,” an homage to “Charlie’s Angels,” after rejecting such suggestions as “Powerpuff Girls” and “Babes of Glory,” which they worried might lead to some trademark issues. (As if they needed more of those in Milan.)
They are a new kind of role model for a new generation of American girls.
They also are the last chance to salvage a disappointing Olympics for American figure skaters.
“I really like that we’re all different,” Levito said, “and we all have our own strengths and personalities, and our own ways we want to look and appear. I think it’s really great, because while we all have the same passion for the sport, and we have very aligned goals.”
‘I thought I would be done at 18’
Glenn grew up in Plano, Texas. Her father, Richard, is a police sergeant and her mom, Cathlene, a fitness instructor. She’s represented the U.S. internationally for nearly 15 years, which happens to be how old Lipinski was when she won Olympic gold.
It’s hard to get more unabashedly American. Yet some critics nevertheless questioned her allegiances on the eve of the Milan Cortina Games, when Glenn answered a question about the political climate for the LGBTQ+ community under President Donald Trump.
“I hope I can use my platform and voice throughout these Games to help people stay strong during these hard times,” she said. “A lot of people will say, ‘You’re just an athlete. Stick to your job. Shut up about politics.’ But politics affect us all.”
Glenn probably wouldn’t have taken such a bold stance a decade ago, when she nearly quit the sport.
But over the course of her career, she’s tackled head-on an eating disorder, which 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.
“I’ve been through a lot,” Glenn told The Associated Press. “It’s taken many, many years to get to this point.”
Now, she has an Olympic gold medal from her Winter Games debut after helping the U.S. defend its title in the team event.
“I stepped away from the sport. I’ve come back. At one point, I hated it. Whenever people would ask me, ‘Oh, should my kids get into it?’ I would be like, ‘No, never,’” Glenn said. “But I’ve seen the people around me grow, and how the environment of figure skating has changed, and how we’re trying to change it. And in doing so, we’ve created an environment I like to be in every day.”
‘I hated skating when I quit’
Liu is the only member of the U.S. women’s 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 that she quit entirely. She was 16 at the time.
“I really hated skating when I quit. Like, I really didn’t like it,” Liu told the AP. “I didn’t care about competitions. I didn’t care about places. I didn’t care about skaters. I didn’t 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’t like interviews. Like, I hated all of it.”
It took walking away for Liu to finally find herself.
The same kid who’d 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.
“I learned so much. Met so many new people,” Liu said. “I had to exercise my free will and push myself in different ways.”
She began contemplating a comeback two years ago, after she went skiing and experienced an adrenaline rush unlike anything she’d felt since hanging up the skates. Liu didn’t know where it would lead — certainly not the first world title for an American since Kimmie Meissner in 2006, and definitely not another Winter Games — but she knew that she loved the feeling of skating again.
Everything in Liu’s life has meaning now, including the striking horizontal stripes in her hair. They’re 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.
“I used to feel like a puppet or a canvas that other people were using,” she said. “Now I do things for myself.”
‘They have no idea what you’re actually like’
Levito has always admired Russian skater Evgenia Medvedeva, perhaps the most dominant women’s skater of the mid-2000s, who was heavily favored to win gold at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games but wound up with the silver medal instead.
“She was just so pretty. I just wanted to have that angelic energy that I feel like she has,” Levito told the AP. “Amber and Alysa have their distinct style, and she was more like me. My style is, I don’t know, put together. I don’t know how to word it.
“The ice princess image,” Levito said, after a long pause, “which is silly to say.”
Mostly because it is just that — an image.
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 the 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.
At last month’s U.S. Figure Skating Championships, Levito was asked her favorite quality in Liu, who was sitting beside her. “I want to say something but I won’t,” Levito said, before succumbing to a little prodding: “She keeps the hoes on their toes,” she said.
“I think it’s so funny,” Levito said later, reflecting on that day. “The internet is like, ‘Our Isabeau is not a baby anymore,’ when they have no idea what you’re actually like. I just don’t want to say the wrong things in front of the media.”
So, Levito plays it safe. She wears a sort of mask for the public, projecting the image she thinks people want to see.
Much like Glenn and Liu have people who can relate to them, there are a whole lot of people who can relate to that.
