![]() I was like, okay, at least now I have some tools in my arsenal to compete against these guys. If you're going to talk about a moment where I was like, I have the chance to make it to where I am now, that was the moment. When did you land your first quad? Fifteen, I believe. It was never really one definitive moment that was like, I got it. But all of that was progressive: one day at a time. By the time I was 15, 16, I was like, oh, I really am stepping forward in this next generation of skating, and I have all the elements and the goods to sort of be amongst the best, at least in the U.S. I competed at nationals when I was 10, so then I started realizing, hey, I stack up okay against these guys. I was just like, if this can help me get into college, if this is an extracurricular that will make me stand apart, that'd be awesome. I don't really know what else to do.” As I was old enough to start formulating my own goals, I still didn't think that I was at a world or an Olympic level. My mom was like, “You should try this, you should try that,” and I was like, “Okay, sure. I always dreamed about it, but I thought, realistically, it's just too hard.Ī lot of goals were formulated by my parents. I never really thought that I was going to make it this far. The rink that I grew up skating in was the practice facility for the Olympics. It was cool to have that growing up, seeing the rings everywhere. He won the next 15 events he entered before finally losing last October.Īt what point did you think, Okay, figure skating might be something I can do for a long time? When did you start thinking about the Olympics? I dreamed about the Olympics since I was three years old, largely because the 2002 Olympics were held in Salt Lake City. In his long program, he landed six quads, jumping from 17th to finish fifth. In his Olympic debut, in 2018, he stumbled on several jumps in his short program-figure skaters are judged on both a short and a long program. ![]() ![]() But, when you're spinning at 400 revolutions per minute, that's a big if. ![]() If Chen lands all of his quads cleanly, he'll be hard to beat in Beijing. At 15, he landed his first quad, which requires hanging in the air for over half a second and completing a punishing four revolutions, a freakish athletic feat that Chen can now do better than anyone else in the world. (He's currently on leave from Yale.) And then he became a three-time world champion and an Olympic medalist.īy age 10, Chen was competing in the U.S. At worst, he figured it'd be a unique enough extracurricular to get him into college. His mom brought him to a public skating session-where he put on some figure skates. “I didn't know jack about hockey, but I thought the gear looked supercool,” says the Olympian, now 22. Long before he was America's next great figure skating hope, Nathan Chen was just a three-year-old boy hoping to play hockey. ![]()
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