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Olympic icon Tenley Albright
By Greg Mette // USOC Media Services // October 31, 2006
Olympic Sport: Figure Skating
Olympic Games Attended: Oslo 1952; Cortina d’Ampezzo 1956
Olympic Medals: 1952 Silver, 1956 Gold
Additional Accomplishments: U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame (1988), World & U.S. Figure Skating Halls of Fame (1976), graduate of Harvard Medical School, first woman to serve as an officer on the U.S. Olympic Committee
Tenley Albright began skating at age eight after her flooded Newton Center, Mass., backyard froze over. Albright’s remarkable figure skating career began a year later when she learned the sport’s techniques.
At age 11, Albright was stricken with non-paralytic polio, confined to a bed and unable to walk for four months. After being released from the hospital, Albright returned to figure skating and won the Eastern Juvenile Skating Championship.
Albright won the silver medal at the 1952 Olympic Games in Oslo, Norway, at age 16. Following the 1952 Games, Albright returned to the United States and won her first of five consecutive U.S. National Championships. A year later, she became the first triple crown winner, capturing the World, North American and U.S. National titles.
Less than two weeks before the 1956 Cortina d’Ampezzo, Olympic Games in Italy, Albright fell and her left skate hit her ankle joint. It cut through her skin, slashed a vein and severely scraped her bone. Her father, a surgeon, flew to Italy and performed emergency surgery, allowing Tenley to become the first American woman to win a gold medal in figure skating.
Following the Olympic Games in 1956, Albright finished college at Radcliffe and graduated with a pre-med degree. She then entered the Harvard Medical School and was one of only six women in a class of 130 students. Albright was inducted into the World and U.S. Figure Skating Halls of Fame in 1976 and the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame in 1988. Currently a surgeon specializing in sports injuries and blood plasma research, she resides in Boston, Mass.
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