Dr. tenley albright biography

American figure skater and surgeon, five-time winner of U.S. women's championship, and first American to win an Olympic gold medal in figure skating. Name variations: "Dr. Tenley." Born Tenley Emma Albright on July 18, 1935, in Newton Center, Massachusetts; daughter of Hollis L. (a surgeon) and Elin Peterson (a housewife) Albright; graduated from Radcliffe College, 1957, and Harvard Medical School, M.D., 1961; married Tudor Gardiner, in 1962 (divorced); married Gerald W. Blakeley; children: (first marriage) three daughters, Lilla Rhys Gardiner; Erin Albright Gardiner; Elee Emma Gardiner.

Earned regional championship figure-skating title for age 12 and under (1947); winner of the U.S. Ladies Novice championship at age 13; winner of the U.S. Ladies Junior title at 14, and the U.S. Ladies Senior title at 16; winner of the U.S. National figure-skating championships five times (1952–56); first

American woman to win the World amateur women's free-skating title (1953); first American to capture an Olympic gold medal in figure skating (1956); first woman to be named to the U.S. Olympic Committee (1976); first woman to be admitted to the Harvard University Hall of Fame (1974); also admitted to U.S. Figure Skating Hall of Fame (1976) and Olympic Hall of Fame (1988).

On July 18, 1935, Tenley Emma Albright was born into a well-to-do family in Newton Center, Massachusetts, just outside Boston. Her father was Hollis Albright, a prominent surgeon, and her mother was Elin Peterson Albright who scheduled the family's generally busy life. Tenley began skating the year she was eight and received her first pair of ice skates at Christmas; the following year, they were replaced by skates with the curved blades used in figure skating. Albright was so enthusiastic about the sport that her father flooded part of the backyard to create ice where she could practice. He also enrolled her at the Skating Club of Boston where she caught the eye of a wel

American figure skater

Tenley Emma Albright (born July 18, 1935) is an American former figure skater and surgeon. She is the 1956 Olympic champion, the 1952 Olympic silver medalist, the 1953 and 1955 World Champion, the 1953 and 1955 North American champion, and the 1952–1956 U.S. national champion. Albright is also a graduate of Harvard Medical School. In 2015, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

Early life

Albright was born in Newton, Massachusetts. Her father Hollis was a prominent surgeon and her mother Elin was an artist. She has a younger brother, Nile.

Career

Figure skating

She began skating at age 8, on a homemade rink in the backyard of her family home.

In 1946, Albright contracted polio, which was deemed to be pre-paralytic. As figure skating historian James R. Hines put it: "Skating provided much needed physical therapy." Since her illness left her muscles “weak and withered”, she started training at the Skating Club of Boston as part of her rehabilitation. She found her rehabilitation "exhilarating". She would later say: "Did you ever notice how many athletes my age once had polio? I think it's because being paralyzed makes you aware of your muscles and you never want to let them go unused again."

Albright had two coaches in her career: Willie Frick and Maribel Vinson. She won the silver medal at the 1952 Olympics. She won her first World title in 1953, silver in 1954, a second gold medal in 1955, and her fourth medal, another silver, in 1956. She was the first American female skater to win a world title. In 1955, she recorded a triple: winning the US, North American, and World Championships that year. She managed to do this while enrolled as a full-time pre-med student at Radcliffe College.

Albright won the US Nationals Novice Championshi

By Darci Miller:

When Dr. Tenley Albright was first learning how to figure skate, World War II was raging and gas rationing meant that driving to a rink wasn’t a decision to be made lightly.

If it was raining, Albright’s mother would suggest that she just not skate that day, or she’d ask that her daughter get off the ice.

“And I’d say, ‘Can I have five more minutes?’” Albright said. “And I think it would’ve been psychologically bad if I had the opposite, if somebody said I had to do it. It was because I wanted to do it.”

This intrinsic motivation pushed Albright to not just an incredible skating career, but a truly incredible life.

On the ice, she’s a five-time U.S. champion (1952-56), two-time World champion (1953, ’55), the 1952 Olympic silver medalist and the 1956 Olympic champion. She was the first U.S. woman to win a World figure skating title, and the first U.S. woman to win Olympic figure skating gold.

It’s now been 65 years since her Olympic triumph, but Albright admits with a laugh that it doesn’t feel that long ago at all.

“I still dream skate and have an awful lot of fun, particularly because when I am dream skating, I can stay up in the air just as long as I want,” Albright said. “One of my favorite jumps was a delayed Axel, but dreaming about it, I can go around as many times as I want, and land as far away as I want, and go as high as I want.

“So it still feels very natural to me,” she said, chuckling.

Since Albright won Olympic gold, six other U.S. women have joined her – Carol Heiss (1960), Peggy Fleming (1968), Dorothy Hamill (1976), Kristi Yamaguchi (1992), Tara Lipinski (1998) and Sarah Hughes (2002). Those women, seven men and one ice dance team make up the exclusive club of U.S. Olympic gold medalists, and Albright counts reuniting to be honored with the group as one of the standout highlights of her career.

“That is always a thrill,” she said. “E

What was my biggest obstacle?

No one ever said, "Well, you're silly to want to be a doctor." Maybe they didn't pay much attention, but they let me have my dream and build my vision more and more.

How do I make a difference?

When you're there in this magical world of the operating room, with a patient and with a team, and you're dealing with something, you never know totally what you're going to find until you're there. If you know yourself, if you've done everything, figured out everything, and really gone through all the thinking, it's sort of like that multidimensional thinking that I was aware of on the ice, where everything comes into your head at once. You have to be focused, but you also have to be conscious of all sorts of things, for the benefit of having the surgery turn out the way you want it to. And then there is that wonderful feeling of completing it, as you put in the last stitch, knowing that you did it the way you wanted to.

What I found was that I spent 23 years in the private practice of surgery, and I began doing one-on-one, and I love, and still do, the idea of what you can do to make it particularly good for a particular patient; make the convalescence easier; create less pain by position—all sorts of little things that it's just sort of a satisfaction knowing that you can do to help.

When I think of making a difference, the first thing that comes to mind is making a difference one by one. Doing whatever I can to make a difference in one life, or one part of one life, and that motivates me to want to do that more. And anything I can do to make a bigger change—whether it's helping to change attitudes, or ways of doing things, or just to encourage all of us to have sort of a sense of openness—that's really what I'd like to do.

Who was my mentor?

When I came to Harvard Medical School, there were 5 of us women in a class of 135. Now, this year our Harvard Medical School admissions are 56 percent women. So...