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GETTING BRONZE
How Olympic figure skater Ashley Wagner landed on Nantucket.
Ashley Wagner remembers every detail of standing on the Olympic podium, waving to the massive crowd assembled at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. It was a day she had been working toward since she first took the ice as a five-year-old in Eagle River, Alaska. Back then, the “rink” was a flooded parking lot outside her school. Eighteen years later she was earning a bronze medal on the grandest stage in the world.
A three-time U.S. national champion, Wagner had a hall of fame career before retiring from competition two years ago. Today, she’s embarked on a new chapter—as a student at Northeastern University, as an entrepreneur, as an NBC commentator, as an advocate for sexual assault survivors and as the fiance to a Nantucket native named Alex who has made the island the famous skater’s summer retreat. This month, Wagner will take the stage at the Dreamland to share her journey.
"I think the reason I fell in love with skating is because I really enjoy the speed and flow of skating, but also because my parents had to move us all the time, and rinks all being similar and somewhat universal, they became imbued with a sense of home,” said Wagner, who is a self-described army brat born on a U.S. base in Heidelberg, Germany. “I could always go in and meet other skaters, make new friends, and that made me really fall in love with it.” Innately competitive, Wagner began entering and winning skating contests almost immediately.
“I remember watching the Olympics in ’98 and Tara [Lipinski] was the youngest champion medalist ever and she didn’t look much older than me!” Wagner said. “I was six at the time and I told my parents I was going to be an Olympian...they didn’t realize how locked in I was. But I was also fortunate my parents committed to making skating a space for whatever I wanted it to be.” Her mom traveled with her to competitions at their various deployments and stations around the country (they moved nine times). By the age of fourteen, she was traveling on her own to competitions around the world.
In the process, she won back-to-back U.S. Championships in 2012 and 2013, before winning again in 2015. The following year, she took the silver in the World Championships. All of those competitions and awards were pointing her to the Winter Olympics. “Over the course of my career, I went through three Olympic cycles and competed in one,” Wagner explained. “I was terrified going out onto the ice—a ten-out-of-ten terrified. To be honest I wouldn’t want to do it again.”
Wagner felt the weight of the world on her shoulders as she took the ice.
“The gravity of it was immense, especially competing in Russia where skating is such a big deal,” she said.
“I couldn’t feel my legs. It was really an incredible moment, but
I don’t remember being on the ice at all.” Wagner does remember standing on the podium, soaking up every detail, as the bronze medal was draped around her neck. “I would remember that moment for the rest of my life,” she said. “All the sacrifice had been worth it.”
Two years after the Olympics, Wagner found herself in Boston for the World Championships where she came in second. The World Championships served as her introduction to the city of Boston and the moment she began considering retirement. “I was old in ‘skating years,’” she said. “I was competing against girls whose parents hadn’t even met yet when I first took to the ice. I was skating against fifteen-year-olds, and beyond that, the length of my career began to take its toll.”
Burned out after years on the ice, Wagner was ready for the next chapter but didn’t know exactly what that was. “Funny thing about being an elite athlete, you’re always so focused on the present and you physically can’t spend a lot of time thinking about the future,” she reflected. “So, I put a finger on the map and said, ‘I’m going here as a way to shake things up and make myself uncomfortable,’ and that’s how I ended up living in Boston.”
Boston afforded Wagner plenty of opportunities to earn an income on the skating event circuit (think Stars on Ice), but she also viewed the skating work as a crutch that was preventing her from really moving on. Ultimately, the COVID-19 pandemic made the decision for her. “I remember going over all these emails saying everything I had coming up was canceled,” she described. “When I realized that all my [skating] work was gone, I had an ‘oh, sh*t’ moment, which ultimately pushed me to go back to school.” She enrolled at Northeastern to study psychology. Today, she’s well on her way to a master’s degree in the discipline, which she plans on using to help athletes transition after competition.
“When I retired, I felt so wildly unprepared for the next chapter of my life,” she said. “I don’t think there are enough resources for elite athletes. There’s a need for counseling and therapy ... I made it through and ended up fine but not without a lot of help along the way.”
During this time, she started dating Alex Clark, a Nantucket native and now Boston-based teacher. Over the past couple of years, she’s been exposed to Nantucket life from the perspective of an insider, making friends on-island and spending as much time here as possible. “Nantucket has really become my favorite place in New England,” she said. “I feel really lucky being dropped into the middle of the actual community.”
This past winter, Wagner joined NBC’s team of broadcast journalists covering the figure skating competitions at the Beijing Olympics. “It was amazing to be on the other side of things,” she said. “Fresh off my experience, I wanted the athletes I covered to be presented as humans, not just competitors. It was an incredible opportunity and a great Olympics to cover, and I hope to continue with them in the future.”
Since society’s emergence from the pandemic, Wagner has begun to build a business that has seen tremendous growth in the past year. Traveling to different cities and rinks across the United States, her Skate and Sculpt fitness program gets former skaters, both professional and amateur, back on the ice to help achieve personal fitness goals. Thanks to a huge response, she and her team are in the process of hiring coaches to create permanent Skate and Sculpt programs in a handful of cities. “I want to redefine people’s relationship with the ice,” she said. “If anyone has ever put on skates, they are welcome to come join us in an old-school power skating class meant to meet people where they are at.”
Ashley Wagner will appear in Nantucket Dreamland’s series Dreamland Conversations (co-sponsored by N Magazine) on Tuesday, August 16, at 6 p.m. Visit the calendar at
nantucketdreamland.org for tickets.
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