Two months after the 2026 Winter Olympics, figure skating’s spotlight hasn’t dimmed, and neither has the drama. Alysa Liu recently endured fan trouble, and now the spotlight has turned to Amber Glenn and Ilia Malin. Fan chatter recently turned icy over the supposed tension between the two, forcing Glenn to step in and set the record straight.

This comes on the back of Glenn “accidentally” liking a tweet which featured a video of Malinin. And fans took to social media believing that there’s a feud between the two. It forced the 26-year-old to respond, and she hit out at said fans, questioning why she would criticize Malinin’s skating.

“Like some of ya’ll really think after how it was HIS Freeskate in the team event at the Olympics that secured us the Gold Medal I would dare to ever criticize his skating like that????” Glenn wrote on X.

She added, “I literally dmed the account because I clicked on the video tapped to skip fwd and didn’t even know I “liked” it.”

“People are roasting me calling me GrAmber because I keep messing up stuff with technology constantly 🥴”

The aforementioned video and tweet have since been deleted, and thus, the context behind the rumoured feud is missing. However, this isn’t the first time fans have come after Glenn. A certain section on social media calls Amber Glenn “GrAmber” although the exact meaning is unknown. But the word is often used to hate on the 26-year-old Olympian, especially across X.

And this time, many of Ilia Malinin’s fans used the same phrase to hate on Glenn. It led to rumors swirling and eventually forced the 26-year-old herself to step in. And unfortunately, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. In that case, the opposite occurred, as fans believed Ilia Malinin and Amber Glenn were dating.

Someone spotted the former dancing in a club with an unidentified blonde woman. Many believed that the woman was Glenn, and the rumours spread immediately. Once again, Glenn was forced to react and shut things down, revealing that she was literally competing at that moment. Thus, it made it impossible for her to be the person that Malinin was seen dancing with.

However, all this was despite the camaraderie that Glenn, Malinin, and Alysa Liu have shown. The trio have often been spotted together, acting silly and making fun of each other on the ice. Nothing defined that more than a video posted just before the Olympics, where the three were simply jumping around on the ice.

More recently, both Amber Glenn and Ilia Malinin were spotted playing around with each other during the Stars on Ice tour. This happened in Japan, with the video floating about social media and clearly showed that the two have no bad blood between them. In fact, Malinin even touched upon how he feels genuine happiness for a fellow figure skater’s success.

Ilia Malinin reflects on the camaraderie in figure skating

Much like Amber Glenn, Ilia Malinin was touted to hit his peak at the 2026 Olympics. Unfortunately, things didn’t quite pan out for the ‘Quad-God’ as he fell short and finished a disappointing eighth place instead. It meant that for the first time after fourteen straight gold medals, Malinin had failed to win a competition.

However, the American still went viral after he was spotted congratulating winner Mikhail Shaidorov. The Kazakhstani figure skater became the first person in the country’s history to win a gold in figure skating. It marked a historic moment, and Malinin went viral for his display of sportsmanship, something he has shown to his Team USA teammates as well.

And it’s one of the reasons he simply loves the sport: the camaraderie they show.

“It’s because I love the sport of figure skating,” Malinin told Star Tribune. “We all support each other. We appreciate each other’s values.

“In the end, it’s a healthy environment to encourage our competitors and help them achieve their goals, so we can progress the sport, as opposed to having it be a rival-on-rival situation.”

In the end, what started as a misplaced like turned into a full-blown rumor cycle. That was before Amber Glenn shut it down just as quickly. And if anything, both her response and Ilia Malinin’s words underline a reality that fans often miss. That the rivalry exists on the ice, but the respect off it runs just as deep.