Nathan Chen Is One Step Closer to Elusive Gold Medal

Four years after a disastrous performance cost him a chance at Olympic glory, the 22-year-old dominated in Beijing on Tuesday. To win, he must continue to fight off nerves—and a positive test.

BEIJING — After it was over, after he had scored a world-record-shattering 113.97 points to take a commanding lead in the men’s figure skating event on Tuesday, after he had erased the disappointment of a disastrous 2018 performance, after he released a weight he has carried for nearly 20% of his life, Nathan Chen thought about what had just happened.

Did he really do that?

Not the skate. The fist-pump with which he punctuated the skate.

“I almost never do stuff like that,” the stoic Chen, 22, said afterward. “But, I mean, I guess it's indicative of how I felt in that moment. Very happy. I kind of broke character a little bit there. I was really happy.”

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The moment stood in stark contrast to his reaction four years ago, when he grimaced and stared at his skates the instant the music ended. He had flown to PyeongChang as the gold-medal favorite, the first man to land five different quadruple jumps (toe loop, Salchow, loop, flip and Lutz) in a competition. But once he arrived, he seemed to spend more time plummeting toward the ice than soaring through the air. He flubbed his short program in the team event, then, a week later, flubbed his short program in the individual event. The 17th-place showing left him outside medal contention.

He likes to “keep things bottled up” and to “maintain that façade,” he said on Tuesday, but there was no mistaking the devastation in his eyes and the tremor in his voice on that day in PyeongChang.

“I honestly have never been in this position before,” he said then. “So I don’t know exactly what to do.”

The pressure off, he performed with more joy and less fear in the free skate to finish fifth overall, but he has spent the last four years wondering if he has what it takes to succeed on this stage.

Now that he is here, it’s not even just about skating. He has to also win “the COVID lottery,” as Canada’s Keegan Messing put it, hours removed from a three-day journey, from Vancouver to Montreal to Milan to Frankfurt to Beijing, after a last-minute positive test before the team’s departure to the Games. Another reminder came in the form of American Vincent Zhou, who announced on Monday that he had tested positive and would withdraw from the individual event. The news came just as his teammates were celebrating their silver medal in the team event—a result Chen helped deliver with another brilliant short program.

Chen did not really need a reminder, though. He has worn a mask to practice for months. In the Olympic Village, he said, he does not even remove it to eat—he just lifts it slightly as he takes each bite. After his press conference, he sanitized his hands and consented to a selfie with a Chinese journalist—so long as she stood six feet away from him.

“It might be overkill,” he said. “But better safe than sorry at this point.”

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Athletes often speak of trying to control what they can control, and Chen is hyperfocused on that idea right now. He left his personal cellphone at home and speaks to only a limited circle on his burner phone. He spends downtime practicing the guitar. He said he expected to celebrate the silver medal, which Team USA is scheduled to receive on Tuesday night, by “doing chores”—laundering his clothes, cleaning his room. The upside of his performance on Tuesday is nearly everything. The downside is that he now has to spend two days thinking about maintaining his lead.

He had a small taste of that pressure after he nailed two quads and a triple Axel on Friday to give the U.S. a lead in the team event.

“It builds confidence knowing that you can do it, but then it's like, O.K., well, I have to do it again,” he said on Tuesday.

He will have to compete against worthy opponents: Two-time Olympic champion Yuzuru Hanyu, of Japan, is probably out of medal contention after placing eighth, but countrymen Yuma Kagiyama and Shoma Uno await in second and third, respectively. (Hanyu, who bailed on a planned quad Salchow after he said he felt a hole in the ice, could still provide fireworks: He said he plans to make history by debuting a quad Axel—four and a half turns, because of its forward takeoff—on Thursday.) But more important than battling the other skaters for Chen will be battling his own brain. His challenge, he said, is to “be present.”

In two days, he will take the ice for the men’s free skate. He will compete last. He will try to control what he can control. And maybe he will produce another performance like he did on Tuesday.

Not the skate. The fist-pump.