Ashley wagner gay

At this time four years ago, Ashley Wagner was beginning the final months of training for what she reasonably could have expected would lead to her second Olympic appearance after having won an Olympic team event bronze medal in Sure, her season had been a struggle, with a subpar seventh-place performance at the World Championships.

But that was still her sixth straight worlds, and, among U. Beyond that, Wagner had skated to a silver medal at the Worlds, to this day the only medal by a U. And Wagner had been just five points from a medal at the Worlds, when she was third in the free skate. In Octoberno one could have foreseen Bradie Tennell going from relative unknown to U.

Wagner, a three-time U. Four months later, after a workmanlike, unremarkable ashley wagner gay at nationals, Wagner would be the odd woman out. She was ashley wagner gay about the scores that kept her from the team and unafraid to say that, her outsized reaction provoked by disappointment that blurred her perspective on what the judges had seen.

Her disapproving expression for her scores in the Olympic team event was right out of the McKayla Maroney meme playbook. She thought going would be better than sitting at home, that she was making lemonade out of lemons, but by the end she was frequently calling her agent to see if she could cut the trip short.

When she came back from South Korea, Wagner was emotionally at sea, and then a car killed her cat. She knew the story of her highly successful career in competitive figure skating, a career in which she was the only other woman but Kwan to win three U. It turned out to be just the impetus she needed to move forward, no matter what was immediately behind her.

Four years later, looking at where she has already gone after relocating from California to Massachusetts, that perspective is clear to her. The story about Ashley Wagner now is no longer that of a woman in competitive figure skating, as it had been for two-thirds of her life.

She has become something of an experiential polymath. She uses Instagram to be an advocate for body positivity. She found the strength to go public in August about her experience of being sexually abused, for which Wagner still seeks therapy today. Inshe bought a three-bedroom house in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester, where she lives with a new cat, a springer spaniel, and her boyfriend of two years, Alex Clarka sixth-grade science teacher.

After years of living a block from a southern California beach she said she never went to, Wagner and Clark frequently hit the water on the Massachusetts island of Nantucket, where he was born and raised. She has skated in shows before the pandemic hit and done some commentary for NBC.

She helps coach young, non-elite skaters at a rink in suburban Wellesley, preferring a secondary, backup role. And as a psychology student, coaching has taught me how to navigate how different people learn in different ways. Much of her life is an open digital book on Instagram, where she mixes daily personal highs and lows with advice for those who, like her, have had issues being comfortable with the dimensions of their bodies.

She knows social media can exacerbate such problems but also knows social media is an efficient way to reach people who have them. She understands how skating fed her insecurities and has come to terms with her complicated relationship with a sport from which she retired as a competitor three years ago.

It was that negative mindset that got me success.

Olympic figure skater Ashley Wagner says she was sexually assaulted as a 17-year-old

I saw it as an opportunity, a means to an end. When I was done, I was really done. The end for a woman with an independent streak who moved across the country on her own to work with a new coach when she turned 18 was to have food on a table and a roof over the head. But that made pressure on me from skating a lot.

Her frequent posts about body positivity have drawn replies from mothers whose young skating daughters are worried about weight.