Amber Glenn Trades Triple Lutzes for Tangos on 'Dancing with the Stars'

More than anything, Olympic figure skater Amber Glenn must be tired.

It was only seven months ago that she arrived at the Milan Cortina Games as a favorite for an individual medal, having clinched her third straight national title a few weeks prior, and only seven months ago that she was devastatingly unsuccessful in that regard, when a mistake during her Madonna-inspired short program routine dropped her to fifth overall in the individual event (she nonetheless went home with some hardware thanks to her work in the team competition).

It was just six months ago that she finished sixth at her fourth-straight World Championships, where she struggled in an error-laden routine to round out her year—“I'm okay! If anything, I'm mentally, emotionally, physically exhausted after a season of extreme highs and lows,” she wrote in a subsequent post on X (formerly Twitter)—and only five months ago that she jumped into the 2026 Stars on Ice tour, during which she Lutzed and Axeled around the U.S. alongside her fellow Olympians.

In short, it has been a behemoth of a year. Glenn has packed a lifetime of achievement into less than 12 months, enough emotion into one season to melt even the thickest of ice. It would be understandable if she wanted to take a break, a vacation, or hey, even a nap before twirling back into the public eye. Yet she has instead chosen to lace up her skates—er, her shoes?—to chase a new dream, one that involves a different kind of prize (and utilizes a different type of footwear) than she’s used to.

This month, Glenn is a contestant on Season 35 of ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, after which she also hopes to compete in the second half of the upcoming skating season. And as for that nap … well, she’ll just do that later.

“If I have everything my way, then, of course, I'll make it to the very end [of the show], and then I'll be able to do Nationals, Four Continents, Worlds, World Team Trophy, and still have that really peak second half of the season, but I can't guarantee how long everything's gonna go,” she says of her skating ambitions.

“So it's something that's uncertain, and I haven't always been the best with uncertainty. But it's another part of Dancing with the Stars that I'm having to really adjust to and learn about, and it's honestly really good for me.”

That’s not to say the decision was easy. Her massive year aside, Glenn is still hungry to compete in the rink, and at 26 years old, those opportunities could be limited. DWTS, though, is its own big break. If she passed it up now, she knew she almost certainly wouldn’t get the call again.

“I didn't want to say no and then miss out on something that I dreamt about since I was a little girl, that I never thought I'd even get the opportunity to do,” she explains. “So it was, of course, hard because I love competing. I love what I do. I love my community and the everyday, but I'm having the time of my life.”

So far, her dance career seems to be going to plan. As was the case with the foxtrotting figure skaters who came before her, Glenn’s athleticism and grace have impressed both the judges and the audience, whose votes and scores decide which contestants stay and which go each episode. Following their Week 2 performance for “Viral Hits Night”—a sultry tango to the “All the Things She Said” remix featured in HBO Max/Crave hit Heated Rivalry—Glenn and partner Pasha Pashkov finished atop the leaderboard with 21 total points.

“It was really amazing to see how passionate the fans were about not just the performance, but the message behind the performance,” says Glenn, an outspoken member of the LGBTQ community. “So it was really, really empowering and encouraging to see the feedback.”

In L.A., her weeks are packed. After a typical show day, which consists of both a full dress rehearsal run-through and a live taping, contestants and their pros are back in the studio immediately the next morning, when Glenn says it feels like you’ve been “hit by a bus.” In addition to interview obligations (of which there are plenty), each team then spends a bit of time recapping its performance from the night before, as well as looking forward to the challenge of the upcoming week.

On Thursdays, she’ll try to squeeze in some skating before media calls and a long rehearsal, followed by costume fittings on Fridays and a weekend spent practicing as much as she and Pashkov can. On Monday, it’s time for camera blocking, and on Tuesday, she’ll do it all again from the top. If she is lucky enough to find a calm moment, she is probably using it to satisfy the program’s rigorous social media component (the TikToks and Reels each pairing posts throughout the week are perhaps just as crucial as the product they put out on the floor), taking her dog, Uki, for a walk or hosting the family that has come into town to see her dance.

“It’s a very chaotic, crazy day, but I've been able to find some downtime and peace to be able to really just prepare myself for the ‘competition,’ because it is a competition, but it feels so different than what I'm used to,” she says.

It would be easy to watch Dancing with the Stars and think that someone like Glenn has a natural advantage, or that her coachability and flexibility make her a shoo-in for the top prize. And though some of that might be true, she insists that her work on the ice is not as much like dance as you’d assume; in fact, she is actually having to unlearn lifelong habits to better fit the ballroom. For one thing, she is used to perfecting one routine for months, rather than barnstorming her way through multiple, week after week. And for another, she just last week had to stop herself from bowing toward the judges’ table following her tango, as she would after a normal skate on the ice.

You might also assume that she received some Mirrorball Trophy–clinching advice from the show-winning skaters who came before her—athletes like Meryl Davis, Michelle Kwan and Adam Rippon. And although Glenn did, in fact, hear from the crew ahead of her appearance, she jokes that their counsel was much less … specific than she had hoped.

“Right after I was announced, I got a text from just about all of them that have been on the show before, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I wonder if they have any secrets. … I hope they can give me some crazy secret advice,’” she says. “And it was, like, ‘Enjoy it.’”

“And I was like, ‘But what do you recommend the most?’ They're like, ‘Just live in the moment.’ I'm like, ‘Oh my God!’”

Coming up, Glenn and Pashkov are preparing for Tuesday’s “Yacht Rock” challenge, in which they will dance a Foxtrot to TOTO's “Hold the Line." The skater says she’s incredibly excited for the performance, having listened to a lot of the genre while growing up in Texas, though probably not as excited as she will be for the Halloween show or for the always-emotional Dedication Night … assuming, of course, that she makes it that far.

“Pasha and I have, in my opinion, a fantastic idea that really connects with a skating routine I did in the past, and a lot of people might not know about it, so I'll get to tell the story of it,” she hints of the Halloween episode. “It was from when I was younger, and it's really, really cool.”

Until then, though, she’ll be caring for her pup, playing Magic: The Gathering (a trading card game and one of her favorite ways to decompress), and doing her best to embrace that advice from Davis, Kwan and Rippon, which hopefully pays dividends not just in the ballroom, but down the line, as well.

“I'm gonna really try and be as present as possible,” she says. “‘Cause that's also something I struggled with in competition and skating. So I'm hoping that, as I learn to really just be present while doing this, I can apply that to my skating in the future.”

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