Amber Glenn just won Olympic gold. Now, she’s chasing a different kind of stage. The 26-year-old figure skater has made clear she wants to follow a well-worn path from the Olympics to the Dancing With the Stars ballroom, joining a list that already includes Jordan Chiles, Kristi Yamaguchi, Sunisa Lee, and Ilona Maher.

“I would love to do Dancing With the Stars,” Glenn told Ilona Maher on her podcast House of Maher. “It’s been a dream of mine since I saw Meryl do it in 2014, and she had to do it while doing Stars on Ice. I could talk to you all day about, like, what your experience was. But, like, about the sets, the music, the makeup, the costumes.” 

That dream has real company behind it. Figure skaters haven’t just shown up on DWTS, they’ve often won it. Kristi Yamaguchi, Meryl Davis, and Adam Rippon are three of the show’s six Olympian champions, and Johnny Weir, Tonya Harding, and Nancy Kerrigan have all made the leap too. Glenn would be roughly the tenth figure skater to try, entering a lineage where the sport has translated onto the ballroom floor about as well as any other.

Her Olympic run is exactly what’s made this moment possible. Glenn went viral in Milan for her sportsmanship as much as her skating, but the skating itself told its own story. A mistake in the short program dropped her to 13th, seemingly ending any medal hopes. She answered with one of the best free skates of her career, a near-flawless performance that pulled her all the way up to fifth. It wasn’t enough for an individual medal, but paired with the team gold Team USA had already claimed, it turned Glenn into one of the breakout names of the Games.

That rising profile is part of why the DWTS talk carries more weight now than it might have a year ago. Glenn has been open about wanting this for a while, and she’s already thought through the details that come with it.

“I just have so much respect for it, and it’s so beautiful. I’ll listen to songs, and I’ll just see it in my head,” Glenn said. “I’m like, this would be perfect for that, and this would be perfect for this. But I’m a singles skater. It’s hard to interpret that when you’re alone.”

She’s even floated a potential partner, Jordan Chiles’ current DWTS pro, Ezra Sosa, and made clear she wouldn’t rule out dancing with a woman either.

“I so would,” Glenn admitted. “I thought about that, too. Like, I, on the ice, lift the other girls all the time. It’s a lot of fun, and usually, when I do paired-up things, I am the lead partner.”

Before any of that becomes real, Glenn has already spent the months since Milan doing something that looks a lot like a trial run.

Amber Glenn opens up on the Stars on Ice tour

Whether or not the DWTS opportunity ever comes, Glenn already has the instincts of a performer, not just a competitor. That much was clear on the Stars on Ice tour, which she joined alongside most of Team USA following the Olympics.

Headlined by Alysa Liu and Ilia Malinin, the tour ran through multiple U.S. cities after a short stop in Japan, kicking off just after the World Championships in Prague in mid-April and continuing into late May. For most skaters coming off an Olympic season, that kind of schedule is exhausting. Glenn loved it.

“It was a blast,” Glenn said. “Kind of think Disney on Ice, but with the Olympic team. We did some of our Olympic programs, and we did some more fun programs, and then we’d do group numbers, which is a blast. It really did become like a family. I miss them so, so much.

For most of the tour, Glenn was performing alongside the same skaters she competes against, including Liu, the woman who’d just beaten her to individual Olympic gold. That dynamic doesn’t sit easily with every athlete, but Glenn has never treated it as a conflict.

“A lot of skaters struggle with that,” Glenn said. “When we’re in practices together and they nail a jump before me, I’m hyping them up. In figure skating, it’s not like, ‘Oh, I crossed the finish line before this person does.’ It’s, ‘Oh, I want to score these points and do the best that I can.’ It’s not in my hands anymore where I end up. You’re competing against them, but you’re competing against yourself, and that’s how I look at it. Not everyone does.”

That same mindset, treating the competition as a version of herself rather than the person next to her, is exactly the kind of approach that tends to translate well into a format like DWTS, where the real opponent each week is your own growth curve, not the couple next to you on the dance floor. If Glenn does get her shot, she’ll be stepping onto a stage that’s already proven figure skaters know how to fill.