Most of Her Breaks Have Been Good Ones

It was such a glorious day outside, Dr. Tenley Albright just had to grab her skates.

Albright, who in 1956 became the first American woman to win an Olympic gold medal in figure skating, was recalling that day last year when she was gliding across the ice on Boston’s Frog Pond and fell and broke her wrist.

“That ridiculous thing,” Albright said from her office at Harvard Medical School. “It was a beautiful day and I was skating for about 10 minutes. I had no edge on my skates and was being really careful. But I looked up at the sky while I was swinging my leg out and I fell. I had never broken anything before.”

Albright, who was born July 19, 1935, in Newton Center, Mass., never let physical setbacks slow her down.

She began taking lessons at the Skating Club of Boston when she was 9, but was stricken a few years later with non-paralytic polio, an illness that prevented her from participating in physical activity for several months. Albright eventually returned to skating, in part to strengthen back muscles that had been weakened while she was hospitalized.

Albright won the 1952 U.S. women’s championships at age 16--the first of five consecutive U.S. women’s singles titles. She earned the silver medal at the 1952 Winter Games in Oslo, and in 1953 became the first American woman to win the world championship.

Determined to become a surgeon like her father, Albright entered Radcliffe College a few months after winning her world title and juggled schoolwork with 4 a.m. practice sessions. She won the 1955 world championship and was the favorite entering the 1956 Winter Games at Cortina, Italy. But less than two weeks before the competition, she fell after hitting a rut in the ice during practice. The blade of her left skate slashed a vein and scraped a bone in her right ankle. Her father was summoned to Italy to attend to the injury.

Albright could not practice until the day before the start of competition. Nevertheless, she went on to become the first American woman to win a figure skating gold medal. After finishing second to American Carol Heiss in the 1956 World Championships, Albright returned to school. She graduated in three years from Radcliffe, entered Harvard Medical School as one of only six women in a class of 130 and went on to become a surgeon specializing in sports injuries.

Before she was inducted into the New England Women’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1998, Albright said her skating experiences prepared her for work as a surgeon.

“When I was competing, we were outdoors,” Albright said at the time. “So despite all my preparation, I never knew whether I would be skating in a snowstorm or whether it would be raining or windy. I’ve learned to expect the unexpected. You don’t always know what you’ll find when you open a patient, and you have to be prepared.”

Albright, who in 1979 became the first woman to serve as an officer on the U.S. Olympic Committee, spent 23 years in private practice. Today, she said she is working at Harvard and the Whitehead Institute at MIT on “a whole new revolution going on in the genome area.”

Albright said she is also excited about the Boston Ice Theater, a skating project started by one of her three daughters.

“Spreading the joy of skating is fun for me,” she said.