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U.S. women’s figure skaters could’ve been rivals. Instead, they’re the ‘Blade Angels’
Alysa Liu, Amber Glenn and Isabeau Levito are representing Team USA in women’s figure skating.
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MILAN — The “Blade Angels” are about to take off.
That’s the official trio nickname for Amber Glenn, Alysa Liu and Isabeau Levito, the figure skaters representing Team USA in the individual women’s competition. They voted on the name last month (it was Liu’s suggestion) and were re-introduced to the world this week in a video narrated by none other than Taylor Swift.
Glenn, Liu and Levito are widely considered the country’s strongest female field in decades: Any one of them — or potentially multiple — could become the first U.S. woman to win an individual figure skating medal since 2006 .
“This is the first time in, I would say, about four Olympic cycles that we have three women who could realistically end up on the Olympic podium,” three-time national champion and 2014 Olympic medalist Ashley Wagner told NPR in January.
The trio — who might have been dubbed the “Powerpuff Girls” or “Babes of Glory” if not for copyright concerns — have an impressive array of accolades between them. Glenn is the three-time reigning U.S. champion, Liu is the reigning world champion and Levito is the 2024 world silver medalist.
But what makes them even more notable is their fierce friendship, which many see as a refreshing change from the dynamic of Olympics past.
“Something that [Liu has] been saying throughout all the press conferences and stuff is… ‘Why is it so shocking that we’re being friendly, that we’re friends?’ They obviously are much younger than I am,” said Glenn, who is 26. “So they don’t know what the atmosphere might have been like before. Not that it was all bad, but there was definitely some intensity.”
Liu is 20 — returning to the sport after her teenage retirement — and Levito is 18.
The three have talked about their friendship as a source of comfort and normalcy in such a high-stakes environment. They have showered praise on each other at every opportunity, including at a press conference at U.S. Figure Skating championships last month.
“I love Isabeau’s wittiness, I’m sure everybody says this, but truly she’s the funniest person I’ve ever met,” Liu said. “And then Amber … you have a lot of love and you give a lot of love. She just radiates that.”
Their support has shone through publicly on social media and in quieter moments. At nationals, Liu, the penultimate skater of the night, bucked tradition by standing rinkside to watch Glenn take the ice — and showered Glenn with hugs after she overtook her for gold. The three were then named to the Olympic team, and reflected on the dynamic they would bring to Italy.
“We all three of us know, OK, yes, we’re competing against each other, but we’re competing to go and do our programs the best we possibly can,” Glenn said. “And wherever that lands us, whatever the judges do, that’s none of our business. As long as we are happy with what we do, I think everyone will be happy.”
Glenn and Liu are already gold medalists, having contributed to the U.S.’ win in the team event — before the week’s series of podium disappointments in the ice dance and men’s categories. The women will compete for the last figure skating medals of these Olympics on Tuesday and Thursday.
Who are the Blade Angels?
Glenn is the three-time reigning U.S. champion, the first woman to hold that title since Michelle Kwan.
She’s also an outspoken mental health and LGBTQ+ advocate. Glenn has been open about her struggles with an eating disorder, anxiety and depression, including the break she took from skating about a decade ago to navigate a mental health crisis.
“I’ve been very outspoken about the ups and downs that I’ve had in my career because I want people to know that that’s okay,” Glenn said last month.
The Texas native has been skating since age 5, but didn’t win an international competition until she was 24. She reached her first Olympics two years later.
Glenn’s artistic power and technical skill — including her consistent triple Axel — make her both a threat and a delight on the ice. She has particularly won over fans with her “Like a Prayer” short program this season, which set a record score at the U.S. championships. Her mantra is “breathe and believe.”
Amber Glenn, pictured on the ice in January, is skating at her first Olympics at age 26.
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Matthew Stockman/Getty Images
Off the ice, Glenn is credited with helping change the culture of the women’s sport by fostering a culture of support and inclusivity, particularly as the first openly queer U.S. women’s champion.
“I saw some of the tension between some of those athletes that are a bit older than me and how it affected their relationship with the sport, with each other, with themselves particularly, and the comparison just got really out of hand,” Glenn told reporters in December. “And I just wanted to be able to feel comfortable in the locker room.”
The younger members of Team USA say they have benefitted from that shift.
“I feel like we’re all so intelligent and mature. And I think it’s also why everyone gets so along in the locker room, because we all realize it’s not that deep,” Levito said at nationals. “And we’re all doing something that we’re passionate about and that we love.”
Liu has also been a positive force for change in that regard.
Alysa Liu (R) takes a selfie at the team event earlier in the Olympics.
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Wang Zhao/AFP
The California native broke onto the scene with her technical prowess at age 12 in 2018, becoming the youngest skater to land a triple Axel in international competition. The following year, she became the youngest-ever U.S. women’s champion. She made her Olympic debut in Beijing in 2022 — then abruptly retired from the sport at age 16, burnt out from years of nonstop training.
Liu used her time away to do regular teenage things like get her driver’s license, travel and enroll in college classes. But a ski trip in 2024 reminded her of what she loved about the sport, and she tentatively returned to the rink. But she hit a full-force comeback when she won the 2025 World Championships, the first American woman to do so since Kimmie Meissner in 2006.
“Quitting was definitely still to this day, like one of my best decisions ever,” Liu said in October. “And coming back was also a really good decision.”
Liu has returned to competition with a renewed love of the sport and sense of self, taking more control over things like costumes and music. She’s stayed true to her own personal style, rocking a smiley piercing and halo hair (“I kind of want to be a tree, add a new ring every year”). And she’s spoken about newly enjoying competition as a chance to showcase her creative artistry.
“I want [the audience] to see my hair, my dress, my makeup, the way I skate,” Liu, now 20, said at the start of the Olympics. “I want people to see everything about me.”
Isabeau Levito channeled Audrey Hepburn’s character in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” short program in the 2024-2025 season.
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Geoff Robins/AFP via Getty Images
Levito, 18, is the youngest member of the team — though has said she feels wiser after a foot injury forced her to take a break in the 2024-2025 season.
“It just made me more grateful for every opportunity I have to skate,” she said.
She is known for her poise and grace on the ice — earning her the name “Tinkerbeau” from some fans and her sense of humor off of it.
Levito, a New Jersey native whose mom hails from Milan, went viral just this week for her enthusiastic response to an interviewer’s question about how much fun she’s been having in the Olympic Village: “You can’t evict me.”
Who is their biggest competition?
Japan has been the U.S.’ closest challenger in the rink this Olympics, and that is poised to be the case for the women’s event too. The rivalry is a respectful one: Skaters from both countries have spoken highly of each other, and several Japanese skaters have gone viral for their wordless tribute to Glenn’s success at a 2024 competition.
Leading the Japanese trio is Kaori Sakamoto, looking to close out her career with Olympic gold. Sakamoto, 25, has said she will retire after these Games, and picked a fitting song for her short program: “Time to Say Goodbye.”
Silver medalist Mone Chiba, gold medalist Amber Glenn and bronze medalist Kaori Sakamoto pose after the women’s event at the 2024 ISU Grand Prix Finals.
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Laurent Cipriani/AP
The three-time world champion and three-time Olympian won bronze in 2022, and helped Japan win silver in this year’s team event.
She is also seen as a “big sister” to her younger Olympic teammates, 2025 world bronze medalist Mone Chiba and 2026 Four Continents silver medalist Ami Nakai — both of whom are also considered strong podium contenders.
But if figure skating at these Olympics have shown us anything, it’s to expect the unexpected. Potential wildcards include Russia’s Adeliia Petrosian, who is competing as a neutral athlete.
Due to Russia’s exclusion from international competition over its war in the Ukraine, the three-time Russian champion has only taken the ice in one senior competition outside of her homeland: the qualifier that got her this spot in Milan.
Petrosian is coached by Eteri Tutberidze, the controversial and prolific women’s coach whose many former charges include Kamila Valieva — the Russian skater who was disqualified from the 2022 Olympics over a doping scandal.
Sunday Puzzle
NPR
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NPR
On-air challenge
I’m going to give you two five-letter words. Add the same two letters at the end of the first one and the start of the second one, in each case to complete a familiar seven-letter word.
Ex. Later Ready –> LATERAL/ALREADY
1. Habit Tempt
2. Laten Press
3. Blank Ching
4. Since Venue
5. Shack Groom
6. Surge Stage
Last week’s challenge
Last week’s challenge came from Rawson Sheinberg. of Plymouth, Mich. Think of a U.S. city with a two-word name. Add a letter to the first word, without rearranging letters, to name a country. Then, without adding a letter, rearrange the letters of the second word to name another country. What places are these?
Answer: Los Angeles –> Laos, Senegal
Winner
Elaine Neel of Derby, Kansas.
This week’s challenge
Next weekend will be the 186th convention of the National Puzzler League, in Bloomington, Ind., which I’ll be attending as always. Two other people who will be there are Henri Picciotto and Joshua Kosman, who created this week’s challenge. Name two words that are opposites. They share a single letter. Remove that shared letter from each word, put a hyphen between the two starting words, and you’ll get a term you sometimes see in food ads. What are the two words?
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it here by Thursday, July 9 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle. Important: include a phone number where we can reach you.
An illustration of the Boston Tea Party, when colonists dumped British East India Company tea into the harbor on Dec. 16, 1773. Some accounts say this marked a pivotal moment when Americans started loving coffee. But one historian says Americans were drinking lots of coffee before then.
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Hulton Archive/Getty Images
A consequential act of defiance secured tea’s place as perhaps the most iconic beverage of America’s colonial era.
The Boston Tea Party became an essential ingredient in the recipe for revolution in the following years.
But tea wasn’t the only hot beverage with a prominent role in America’s fight for independence.
Coffee was an important part of American culture from the start. And coffeehouses were essential, too — serving as hubs for brewing ideas of independence.
As the United States celebrates 250 years, here’s what to know about America’s early history of coffee.
Colonists were drinking coffee long before the United States existed
Europeans brought coffee with them when they came to America.
“The first documented example of a mortar and pestle used to grind coffee beans was on the Mayflower” in 1620, says historian Michelle Craig McDonald, the author of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States.
“The fact that coffee was present so early is not surprising if you think about it,” McDonald says. “A number of those who were on the Mayflower came to North America from Amsterdam, which was a major coffee trading center in Western Europe by the 17th century.”
The first coffeehouse in the colonies opened in 1676 in Boston, a century before the U.S. declared independence, she says. Some taverns sold coffee even earlier.
The Boston Tea Party probably wasn’t the dramatic turning point toward coffee that some claim
On the night of Dec. 16, 1773, disgruntled colonists boarded three ships moored in Boston Harbor and threw overboard more than 92,000 pounds of tea owned by the British East India Company.
Tensions had been building between the Crown and the colonies over the previous decade, as Britain tried to levy taxes on its colonies to recoup war debts.
The Boston Tea Party protest was targeted at the British government’s passing of the Tea Act in 1773, which granted the East India Company a monopoly over tea sales in the colonies. While the British had removed some unpopular taxes in the preceding years, they left tea taxes in place. Colonial merchants were especially upset that the act allowed the East India Company to undercut their tea business.
To build solidarity for their cause of sovereignty, some patriots called on colonialists to swear off tea in favor of coffee. It’s why many histories point to the Boston Tea Party as a turning point when Americans switched from mostly drinking tea to mostly coffee. The anti-tea sentiment was immortalized in a founding father’s now-famous letter.
In July 1774, John Adams (before he became the second U.S. president) wrote to his wife Abigail, recounting an incident during his travels. After a long day, he asked the proprietor of the house where he was lodging for a cup of tea, provided it was smuggled and free of British taxes.
” ‘No sir, said she, we have renounced all Tea in this Place. I cant make Tea, but I’le make you Coffee.’ Accordingly I have drank Coffee every Afternoon since, and have borne it very well. Tea must be universally renounced. I must be weaned, and the sooner, the better,” Adams wrote.
Despite John Adams claiming a newfound patriotic duty to appreciate coffee, McDonald says colonists had been drinking lots of coffee all along.
She studied advertisements from the 1760s and ’70s to estimate how many shops sold coffee versus tea. Even before the Boston Tea Party, she says, “coffee is definitely more broadly available than tea is.”
A big reason? It was cheaper. “Its price again per pound is significantly less, which tells you about its availability, its accessibility to drinkers.”
Historians say it’s hard to definitively compare tea with coffee consumption, though, as official records from before America gained independence were inconsistent.
And smuggling was rampant, making official records even less reliable.
“There is a vast amount of smuggling,” says Joyce Chaplin, a professor of early American history at Harvard University. “So they’re not paying formal duties on tea that they get from the Dutch. They’re probably not paying formal duties on coffee from the French Caribbean.”
And Chaplin notes that people who loudly proclaimed a new appreciation for coffee over tea weren’t always doing what they said. It could have been political pandering. “I do not drink tea that comes via the East India Company,” she posits someone of the era saying. “But, you know, other sources are fine. Ditto for the coffee.”
Coffeehouses were a hub for revolutionary ideas
A coffeepot with cover, circa 1795. It has an American eagle motif, made in China for the American market. Coffee was part of a growing trend of globalization in the colonial era.
Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images
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Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images
In the colonial era, coffeehouses were hotbeds for seditious thought — where people planned acts of revolution.
“Coffeehouses are kind of famous for being places where people think and plot things,” says Mark Pendergrast, author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World.
A coffeehouse called the Green Dragon served as one of the locations for planning the Boston Tea Party. Years earlier, the Old London Coffeehouse in Philadelphia was a meeting place for strategizing responses to another British tax, the Stamp Act of 1765.
In Britain, coffeehouses were nicknamed “penny universities,” Pendergrast says: “because for a penny you could go and learn a whole lot by sitting around in a coffeehouse and discussing everything.” The same attitude traveled across the Atlantic.
Early American coffeehouses would commonly have city business directories, libraries of newspapers and currency exchange information. People could get maritime insurance there or buy things at auction.
“There’s a reason why coffeehouses become places of colonial protest … in the 1760s, in the 1770s, and it’s because it is the place where traders and merchants tended to gather,” historian McDonald says. “That’s where they heard about the economics of the day.”
Taverns were more likely than coffeehouses to have rooms for rent and stables for travelers’ horses. They were also more likely to have food.
Interestingly enough, coffeehouses could serve alcohol and taverns could serve coffee.
But the vibes at each were different. While women and men could “riotously drink together” in taverns, coffeehouses often didn’t allow women, according to Chaplin of Harvard.
“The sense was the coffeehouse was the place where you had a clear head — to argue about politics, to find out what was going on in the business world, to cut a business deal,” she says. “Whereas taverns were places where, in a sense, you refueled.”
Still, she says, the lines between the two “weren’t completely clear.”
The cost of America’s revolutionary drink
Coffee (and tea for that matter) was part of a growing globalization of trade around this time.
Much of the coffee in the colonies was grown in the Caribbean, while tea came from China.
Supply was up and coffee was easier than ever to drink. “Trade and frankly, imperialism, are making it possible for … colonial products to be produced and transferred to other parts of the world in greater and greater quantities,” says Chaplin.
As a result, by the time of the American Revolution, both coffee and tea were in reach for many common people. “They’re both becoming affordable luxuries,” Chaplin says.
Fancy coffee and tea paraphernalia were also part of this increasingly global market. Middle and upper-class people would have wanted special implements for drinking these beverages and a place to drink it. That meant they needed wood for coffee tables, silver for coffeepots, and porcelain for teapots.
“These two beverages are encouraging people to consume all kinds of new stuff,” says Chaplin. “The mahogany that comes out of the Caribbean, the china coming out of China, silver that is mined principally in South and Central America and processed in a lot of the parts of the world.”
There’s a dark side to coffee’s history, too. The plantations that supplied the crop ran on the labor of enslaved people. By 1790, half of the world’s coffee was being grown in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, in what is today Haiti, Pendergrast says, where slaves were routinely mistreated, raped and murdered.
The Declaration of Independence, signed in 1776, is infamous for a contradiction. It proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” but failed to acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of enslaved people living in America at the time.
Coffee carried a similar contradiction. The beverage that fueled conversations that inspired America’s fight for independence — centered on the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — depended on enslavement.
“Coffee had this paradoxical effect, that it did promote revolutionary thought,” Pendergrast says. “But it was also grown by slaves.”
Just in time for a contentious 250th anniversary of the United States of America, historian David S. Reynolds’ latest book, Two Ships, helps us realize that any country that couldn’t agree on its own origin story is destined for divisive times.
Two Ships is about the complicated, conjoined legacy of the landings of the Mayflower, which carried the Pilgrims to Plymouth, Mass., in 1620, and the White Lion, which arrived in Jamestown a year earlier, bringing the first enslaved Africans to Virginia.
As Reynolds demonstrates, it’s not so much the facts of these two voyages, as it is the meanings ascribed to them, that made them such a powerful metaphor for two conflicting visions of American identity.
To simplify, the Mayflower’s passengers were separatist Puritans, dissenters to the reign of the English king, James I. As the United States developed, the Mayflower was credited with carrying the seeds of a radical democracy to the New World, one in which all men (in theory, at least) were equal before God.
In contrast, the European settlers of Jamestown were Royalists, also known as Cavaliers. Loyal to the monarchy, they believed in a strict hierarchy.
But the meaning of the images of the two ships shifted depended on who was invoking them and when. Not surprisingly, the metaphor was deployed most vigorously during the Civil War. In abolitionist speeches and writings, the White Lion or the “Slave-Ship,” as it was commonly called, was condemned for infecting America with the “plague-spot” of slavery.
Reynolds says that Frederick Douglass resorted to the “two ships” metaphor frequently, while Lincoln avoided it, hoping to preserve a unified ship of state. Meanwhile, Southern descendants of Cavaliers invoked the Mayflower to emphasize the intolerance and “cruel, persecuting” character of the Puritans. In a comment that resonates for our own times, Reynolds says:
It didn’t matter to the South that … by the mid-nineteenth century, the North had become a kaleidoscope of religious denominations, …, few of which resembled the faith of the Plymouth colonists. Distortion is intrinsic to cultural memory, especially when amplified by sectional or political bias. For Southerners, the Mayflower had brought Puritanism, which had yielded fanatical movements like abolitionism, now a dire threat to the Union.
In a brief-but-fascinating digression into the unpredictable power of literary fiction, Reynolds observes that the South’s fondness for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s anti-Puritan novel, The Scarlet Letter, and, even more, for the medieval historical romances of Sir Walter Scott, bolstered its nostalgia for a largely-imagined feudal society.
Reynolds quotes the always-quotable Mark Twain, no fan of Scott’s, as saying that Scott “did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote …”
Two Ships is a dazzling survey of some three centuries of American history through a close reading of a metaphor. By the 1890s, Reynolds says, the interpretive tide had turned again: “Southern and Northern whites, feeling threatened by people of color and by an array of European immigrants, were retreating to a cocoon of racial solidarity that Mayflower celebrations helped reinforce.”
By the later-20th century, the image of the Mayflower was depoliticized and commercialized into Pilgrim hats and Black Friday sales. The powerful metaphor of the two ships receded into the mist.
Seven years ago, however, the 1619 Project piloted the White Lion — “The Slave-Ship” — back into view and anchored it at the center of debates about slavery’s place in the national story. The 1619 Project has been faulted for its historiography, and it does lie outside of the chronological boundaries of Reynolds’ book; still, it seems too momentous a reappearance of the White Lion not to at least acknowledge in this book.
That criticism noted, I think reading Two Ships would be an excellent way to observe this particular Fourth of July. It’s wise for all of us to have a more informed awareness of how Americans have understood, misunderstood and, often, flattened each other into stereotypes. Or, as Ernest Hemingway, one of the Mayflower Pilgrims’ more cynical descendants, might say in response to that sentiment: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
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