Albright, Tenley E.
Figure skating
b. July 18, 1935, Newton Center, MA
In her early teens, Tenley Albright had two ambitions: To become a surgeon, like her father, and to win a gold medal in figure skating. She achieved both in a remarkably short time.
Albright began taking skating lessons when she was nine years old. Non-paralytic polio kept her inactive for several months, but she then returned to the sport, partly to strengthen the back muscles that had been weakened by inactivity.
She won the Eastern regional championship for juveniles under 12, then the national novice title, then the national junior championship. In 1952, at the age of sixteen, she won the first of five consecutive U. S. women's singles titles, and followed that with a silver medal at the Winter Olympics in Oslo.
Albright in 1953 became the first American woman to win the world championship in figure skating. She also won the U. S. and North American titles that year to become the first ever triple crown winner.
A few months later, she entered Radcliffe College as a pre-med major. Her practice sessions were now scheduled from 4 to 6 a.m. Then she had her college classes, study, and homework, as well as ballet lessons. Early in 1955, she took a leave of absence from college to win her second world championship.
Less than two weeks before the 1956 Winter Olympics in Cortina, Italy, Albright fell after hitting a rut in the ice while practicing. Her left skate cut so deeply into her right ankle that it slashed a vein and scraped bone. Her father flew to Italy and did some emergency repair work. Skating beautifully despite the pain, Albright became the first American woman to win the figure skating gold medal, getting first-place votes from ten of the eleven judges.
Two weeks later, still bothered by the ankle injury, she finished second to another American, Carol Heiss, in the world championships.
Despite her grueling schedule, she graduated from Radcliffe at twenty-one, after just three years of undergraduate work, and began her studies at Harvard Medical School, one of only six women in a class of 130 students. She is now a surgeon specializing in sports injuries.