“I did my job,” she told NBC News. “I made sure to have that moment in the sequence where I acknowledged, ‘Hey, I’m here at the Olympics and I’m on my feet.’ So overall, I’m pretty satisfied.”
Glenn had a near-flawless skate.
She nailed her triple axel, the hardest jump of the competition and one that only she and one other skater attempted. Glenn also landed several difficult jumping passes, including a triple flip-triple toe loop combination and a triple loop-double axel-double axel combination. But on her final jump, a triple loop, Glenn put her hand down, losing some points in an otherwise stellar performance.
The mistake hurt her score — and potentially cost her a medal. Despite the fall, she said she was happy with her performance.
“If I had skated how I did today, I thought maybe it’d be possible” to medal, she said. “And I was only, like, two points away from winning the free skate. Oh, my gosh, a silly little mistake cost me, but overall, I’m just so happy.”
Glenn reacts Thursday.Elsa / Getty Images
That silly mistake was in the short program when she did a double loop rather than a triple, meaning it was marked as an invalid element and she received zero points.
But Glenn scored so highly in the free skate that she sat on the side of the podium for more than an hour waiting out the scores. It wasn’t until Mone Chiba of Japan, the fourth skater from the end, posted a 217.88 that she was out of first place overall.
Japan’s Kaori Sakamoto and Ami Nakai and Glenn’s teammate Alysa Liu followed and overtook her score, knocking her off the podium.
Glenn said she was “conflicted” watching every skater after her perform.
