At the end of it all, the heroics took a backseat. At the end of it all, it was a routine win on the biggest stage of all for Nathan Chen.
All thanks to the past four years.
Chen won gold in the first individual event in figure skating at the 2022 Olympic Winter Games, closing out a four-year quest that was jumpstarted by his disappointment in PyeongChang, where he bombed the short program and fought back from 17th and won the free skate to take fifth overall. Don’t let anyone fool you - as much as some in the media will tell you that he was the favorite in PyeongChang, he was really one of a few people who could’ve won that event. At that point in his career, he was still somewhat untested, having had only one Worlds appearance where he finished sixth.
The journey from PyeongChang
He himself will tell you that he was mentally ill-prepared for PyeongChang - circling around in his own world trying to figure out how to win the competition of his life while dealing with nagging injuries that he rarely spoke about. But whereas PyeongChang was uncharted territory for him, Beijing is exactly where he wanted to be.
After all, the past four seasons have been all about practice for Nathan Chen. Every turn at the World Championships, of which he won three in a row, every encounter against Yuzuru Hanyu, every time he’s had to defend a lead or find a way to come back from a deficit - it was another rep for his brain to prepare for Beijing.
And there was so much talk from the outside about “demons” and “redemption” coming into Beijing, but if you look at his track record, why would anyone even second guess his mental fortitude? We’ve watched him have to skate multiple times after Hanyu and warm up in the sea of Poohs that rain down from the audience. We’ve watched him take huge leads into the free skate and skate on offense, not on defense, to win by an even larger margin. We’ve watched him have to find a way to come back - like he did at the World Championships last year - to win a competition. He’s checked them all off.
There’s no one who could have been more prepared than the guy who won 11 of 12 international competitions.
Rounding into form
And there was nothing easy about his past two weeks in Beijing. Before the Team Event started, he had up and down practices, including one that was the worst practice that I’ve ever seen from him. He was struggling with one jump in every practice. But the day before the Team Event short program, it clicked and his muscle memory took over the nerves. And after he put down that clean short in the Team Event, he became the skater that we’ve come to know - steely, focused, knowing exactly what he needed to accomplish.
But what I didn’t realize was that he had even one more gear left, and that was activated the day Hanyu finally showed up to Beijing and practiced. Without even realizing it, he turned up his intensity and it was game time.
His short and free were the culmination of all of it, everything that he has filed away from his experiences since PyeongChang. Yet there was another aspect of both skates that we have rarely seen from him - a rush of raw emotion that he has held back so often. Chen said himself that he didn’t know what came over him, but in reality, what he did was learn to fully embrace the experience of his second Olympics.
When Rocketman launched into space with perhaps the best quad lutz he’s ever done in his life, Chen lit up and projected to the audience like he never had before. The visible show of joy was surprising to even him, and by the end of his program, he was having the time of his life and embracing every moment of it.