Sarah Hughes

Sarah Elizabeth Hughes is an American former competitive figure skater, born in 1985 in Great Neck, New York, who won the gold medal in ladies' singles at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City in a result widely considered one of the biggest upsets in figure skating history, defeating favored competitors Michelle Kwan and Irina Slutskaya at age sixteen. During that free skate she landed two triple jump-triple jump combinations, a first for women at the Olympics, and she had won the bronze medal at the 2001 World Championships the year before. She received the James E. Sullivan Award in 2002, later attended Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and mounted an unsuccessful campaign for the U.S. Congress in 2023.