Amber Glenn, the Team USA figure skater who made more headlines for her politics than her performances, finished 13th in the women's singles short program at the Milan Cortina Olympics on Tuesday after omitting a required triple loop from her routine.
The mistake earned her a zero in the technical skill category for the element and cost her seven technical points, according to Sports Illustrated. Her final score: 67.39. She struggled to hold back tears on the ice before embracing her coach.
Glenn had been seen as a favorite to medal in women's singles. That prospect now looks grim.
As Breitbart reported, the collapse is striking, given where Glenn stood just days ago. Last Sunday, she won gold in an earlier event at the Games. After that victory, she posted a TikTok celebrating the moment with a message aimed squarely at her critics.
"They hate to see two woke b*tches winning."
By Tuesday, the story had changed. Glenn landed her triple axel but skipped the required triple loop entirely, a decision that gutted her score and left her buried in the standings. Sports Illustrated laid out the math plainly:
"With a score of 67.39 in the short program, Glenn finished in 13th place in Tuesday's competition. Her mistake cost her seven technical points from her score. It'll be extremely difficult for her to medal on Thursday following the free skate."
Thursday's free skate is still ahead, but climbing from 13th into medal contention would require a historic performance and a wave of collapses above her. The math doesn't lie, even when the narrative does.
Glenn, who has identified as bisexual and pansexual, spent the weeks leading up to the Olympics injecting politics into what should have been a straightforward athletic story. She made public comments claiming the LGBTQ+ community in the U.S. was enduring a "hard time" under the current administration.
"It's been a hard time for the community overall and this administration. It isn't the first time that we've had to come together as a community and try and fight for our human rights. And now, especially, it's not just affecting the queer community, but many other communities."
The backlash was swift. Glenn eventually suspended her social media accounts, citing the "hate" she said she was facing. When the criticism didn't subside, she leaned further in, posting a follow-up defending the label she'd given herself:
"If 'Woke' means people who use their platforms to advocate for marginalized communities in the country that they are actively representing…… Then yeah sure?"
There's a pattern here that extends well beyond figure skating. An athlete representing the United States on the world stage decides the platform is best used not to compete but to litigate domestic cultural grievances. The crowd is supposed to cheer. The media is supposed to amplify. And when ordinary Americans push back, the athlete plays victim.
The uncomfortable truth Glenn's 13th-place finish illustrates is one the sports world keeps learning and refusing to absorb: the arena doesn't care about your TikTok.
You can call yourself a "woke bitch" and collect applause from the corners of the internet that reward that sort of thing. You can position yourself as a voice for the marginalized while competing on a global stage most people will never touch. You can frame every critic as a bigot and every setback as persecution.
But the ice is merciless. It doesn't grade on ideology. It doesn't award points for courage in posting. When you skip a required element, you get a zero. The scoreboard is indifferent to your pronouncements about human rights.
None of this is to say Glenn doesn't have the right to her opinions. She does. But the choice to make yourself a political symbol carries a cost. Every camera that followed her to Milan was tracking two stories at once: the skater and the activist. When you invite that scrutiny, a 13th-place finish doesn't land as a quiet disappointment. It lands as a verdict.
Glenn still has the free skate on Thursday, and stranger things have happened in figure skating. But the deficit is enormous, and the field above her isn't likely to cooperate.
The broader lesson is one conservative sports fans have been articulating for years. Americans don't tune into the Olympics to hear lectures about domestic politics from athletes draped in the flag. They tune in to watch excellence. They want to see someone who trained for a decade land the jump, not someone who trained for a decade and spent the last month picking fights on social media.
Glenn chose to be a symbol. On Tuesday, the scoreboard chose what she was a symbol of.
