U.S. figure skating targets record medal haul at

MILAN — Amber Glenn achieved a lifelong purpose, sealing her Olympic bid by successful her third consecutive U.S. championship last month. Her first celebration got here with her opponents.

“We all deserve it,” Glenn said with her arms wrapped around national silver medalist Alysa Liu and bronze medalist Isabeau Levito.

The spirit of collaboration has introduced U.S. figure skating into a new golden age. The 16-athlete group the United States despatched to Milan will be the nation’s strongest Olympic group in a long time. With three reigning world champions and three current Grand Prix remaining champions, the United States is poised for one of its best Olympic Games ever in figure skating.

The U.S. record for most medals in figure skating at a single Olympics is 5 from 1956, when the U.S. swept the rostrum for the boys’s singles competitors. The nation has never received three figure skating gold medals in one Games.

“We’re all in this together,” said Justin Dillon, U.S. Figure Skating senior director of athlete high efficiency. “We’re all working towards those goals. … I very much appreciate our athletes really wanting to outdo themselves, outdo each other but with respect and at the highest level possible.”

The United States is sort of assured a repeat gold in the boys’s singles event with Ilia Malinin, whose unmatched quad axel has him on a two-and-a-half-year successful streak. Ice dancers Evan Bates and Madison Chock are three-time defending world champions who return to their fourth — and seemingly remaining — Olympics together poised to earn the only particular person medal that has eluded them.

And the ladies’s group has three strong contenders to end a 20-year Olympic medal drought. Liu is the reigning world champion and Grand Prix Final champion. Levito took silver at the world championships in 2024. Glenn outpaced both to win another U.S. championship.

Making her Olympic debut, the 26-year-old said she got here through the game between two generations of skaters. Glenn noticed how the stress of comparability impacted her older friends and needed to make sure the tradition among feminine skaters might be healthy for athletes coming after her. How she did it was by speaking through her nerves with the athletes who knew precisely what she was feeling.

“To be able to have a good, healthy teammate-like relationship with those people, I think, has benefited all of us tremendously,” Glenn said. “Because we bring each other up rather than trying to just step on each other to get higher up.”

With three particular person gold medals in sight, the United States is also favored to win group gold for the second consecutive Games. The group competitors begins Friday with the rhythm dance and ladies’s and pairs short packages.

The alternative for a second group gold medal comes after the 2022 Olympic title got here with controversy. The United States completed second, but was awarded the gold after Russian skater Kamila Valieva was disqualified because of a constructive drug take a look at from a pattern submitted two months before the Games. The medal ceremony was canceled. With the investigation hanging over the then-15-year-old competing in the premier event of the Winter Olympics, Valieva struggled during the person competitors and broke down in tears in the kiss-and-cry.

The doping scandal, mixed with the pandemic, made it really feel like “a dark cloud was over [the sport],” 2018 Olympian Adam Rippon said.

“If I was a young kid, I don’t know if that would motivate me or get me on my hands and knees to beg my mom to take group classes. All of those women ended up in tears,” Rippon said. “I think that this Olympics is going to be so different.

“I think that this Olympics, there’s going to be so many people who become more interested in skating and want to follow it year round. And also a lot of young kids who are like, you know what? I want to be just like Ilia. I want to be just like Amber Glenn.”

U.S. figure skater Ilia Malinin takes half in a training session at Milano Ice Skating Arena on Wednesday. Malinin is the favourite for gold in the boys’s competitors.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Interest in figure skating is already up. The ladies’s and pairs free skate competitions at the U.S. championships had been NBC’s most-watched U.S. figure skating telecast since 2019, averaging 2.5 million viewers. The viewers for the boys’s free skate — where Malinin received his fourth consecutive national title — and ice dance jumped 51% from the corresponding pre-2022 Winter Games telecast to 2.2 million viewers.

Still, the game is much behind its heyday when figure skating was the second-most watched sport in the United States after the NFL.

The 1994 ladies’s technical program, which featured Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding a month after Kerrigan was struck on the knee with a baton, drew the third-highest TV ranking for any sporting event at the time. Only Super Bowls XVI and XVII had been rated greater.

The sport was constructed on rivalries. Skating was a “dog eat dog” sport, said Brian Boitano, the 1988 Olympic champion who was pitted against Canadian Brian Orser in “The Battle of the Brians.” Opponents had been pleasant, but actually not buddies, Boitano said.

This golden age of skating is constructed equally on camaraderie and competitors. The sight of Liu and Levito standing behind the boards, leaping and cheering for Glenn when she completed her free skate to win her third U.S. championship went nearly as viral as Glenn’s successful efficiency.

“To see this team supporting each other like they have, I feel like that’s the thing that … can make people love them,” Boitano said. “They are so lovable, and they are so inspiring, and it’s so refreshing, especially in this day and age.”

Figure skaters (from left) Alysa Liu, Amber Glenn, Isabeau Levito and Bradie Tennell pose with their medals at the U.S. figure skating championships on Jan. 9.

(Matthew Stockman / Getty Images)

Younger skaters often ask the legends what the game was like during the earlier era. Boitano remembers skilled competitions, sold-out cross-country tours and TV exhibits. But the magic was the skaters on the ice, he said. The numerous solid of characters assembled over a number of Olympic cycles included Scott Hamilton, Boitano, Katarina Witt, Debi Thomas, Kristi Yamaguchi, Philippe Candeloro and Surya Bonaly.

Boitano is thrilled to cross the torch to the current era understanding even the celebs of his time couldn’t match this group’s success in one key space: The United States had never beforehand received three world championships in a single yr.

“I honestly think if this crew can’t bring back the popularity of figure skating,” Boitano said, “I don’t think it can be done.”