At age 11 Albright suffered an attack of polio. Skating was her therapy to regain muscle strength.[2]
Albright 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, silver, in 1956.[3]
In 1956, while training for the Olympics, Albright fell due to a rut in the ice and cut her right ankle joint to the bone with her left skate.[4] The cut was stitched by her father, a surgeon.[4][5] At the 1956 Winter Olympics in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, she became the first American female skater to win an Olympic gold medal.[6]
Albright retired from competitive skating after 1956 but has maintained a prominent role in the figure skating profession as a member of the Executive Committee of the U.S. Olympic Committee.[5]
Medical career
A graduate of The Winsor School in Boston, Albright entered Radcliffe College in 1953 as a pre-med student,[5] and focused on completing her education after the 1956 Olympics.[6] She graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1961, went on to become a surgeon,[6][7] and she practiced for 23 years, continuing as a faculty member and lecturer at Harvard Medical School. For a while she chaired the Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. As a director, she has served both not-for-profits such as The Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and for-profit enterprises such as West Pharmaceutical Services, Inc., and State Street Bank and Trust Company.[8] She is currently the Director of the MIT Collaborative Initiatives.[9]
Personal life
Albright was married to Tudor Gardiner, a lawyer, from 1962 to 1976. In 1981 she married former Ritz-Carlton hotel owner Gerald Blakeley, who shares her association with Woods Hole and is chair of The Morehouse School of Medicine.[10]