At Grand Prix Final, Nathan Chen's brilliance nearly defied description - again

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At Grand Prix Final, Nathan Chen's brilliance nearly defied description - again

What Nathan Chen did in winning the 2019 World Figure Skating Championships was something I never had seen before and wasn’t sure if I would ever see again.

That explains the headline on my nbcsports.com story about Chen’s victory: “By any measure, Nathan Chen’s performance at Worlds matches standard for transcendent greatness”

So it’s no wonder I was left goggle-eyed at what the 20-year-old Chen did in Saturday’s free skate at the Grand Prix Final in Turin, Italy.

It was even better than what Chen had done some six months ago at the worlds in Japan.

Not only did Chen decisively beat his rival, two-time Olympic champion Yuzuru Hanyu of Japan, for a second straight time in a major event, Chen did it on a day when the competitiveness of both figure skaters also was transcendent.

That led me to embark breathlessly on a tweet storm that is the best way to describe all of the brilliance Chen displayed to win a third straight Grand Prix Final title - and the first victory in when he had competed in the event against Hanyu, who missed the last two with injuries.

The tweets cover it all. Here they are:

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Russian Quad Squad, Chen-Hanyu rivalry: Grand Prix season so far

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Russian Quad Squad, Chen-Hanyu rivalry: Grand Prix season so far

A little slow getting this onto Globetrotting, so here are a few updates:

*Anna Shcherbakova won Cup of China by nearly 15 points, making the Russian women 4-for-4 heading into the penultimate Grand Prix series event, Rostelecom Cup this weekend in Moscow (see item 1.)

*Shcherbakova got full credit on one of her two quad Lutz attempts in China (the other was judged under-rotated.) So 17 of the 21 women’s jumps credited as quads this season have received positive GOE (see item 2.)

*A second-place finish at Cup of China was the 12th straight Grand Prix medal for U.S. ice dancers Madison Chock and Evan Bates and made them likely qualifiers for the Grand Prix Final (see item 10.)

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With the senior Grand Prix series at its halfway point and skaters heading for Chongqing, China for the fourth of six “regular season” events, here are 10 things we’ve learned from the series so far:

WOMEN

1. The kiddie corps of Russian women has been even better than expected – and expectations were very high.

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By any measure, Nathan Chen’s performance at Worlds matches standard for transcendent greatness

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By any measure, Nathan Chen’s performance at Worlds matches standard for transcendent greatness

Transcendent greatness in sports is both absolute and relative.

Absolute, because anyone who sees an exceptional performance can recognize it as exceptional judged against nothing but its own merits.

Relative, because we seek to define greatness by comparison, to determine levels of it (greater? greatest?) when judged by other exceptional performances we have seen or know of, no matter how hard it is to make such comparisons across long periods of time, with the wildly different athletic parameters of different eras.

No matter which standard we use, absolute or relative, what Nathan Chen did in winning the 2019 World Figure Skating Championships in Japan was transcendent greatness.


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And the tweet storm continues: Dazzling Chen, brilliant Brown, wondrous Sui-Han, faltering Hanyu on Day 2 of figure skate worlds

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And the tweet storm continues: Dazzling Chen, brilliant Brown, wondrous Sui-Han, faltering Hanyu on Day 2 of figure skate worlds

I sum up another memorable day at the 2019 worlds, 240 (or fewer) characters at a time.

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Nathan Chen, student and skater, tries to have two parts in harmony again at world championships

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Nathan Chen, student and skater, tries to have two parts in harmony again at world championships

Nathan Chen has had little down time at Yale University since the beginning of his first-year classes in late summer.

The reigning figure skating world champion had embarked in August on a journey unlike almost any other in the history of the sport. Not only was he trying to blend both full-time college studies and competitive skating, as other champions had successfully done in the past, he was trying to do it with limited input from a coach who was 3,000 miles away.

His skating practice schedule includes a one-hour round trip to a nearby rink. His courses this semester include calculus, statistics, abnormal psychology and Listening to Music.

But it’s typical of Chen that when he had a break from classes last week, he used it to take on another challenge.

He went into an empty common room at one of Yale’s 14 residential colleges and sat down at a piano that was, to be polite, in need of some TLC.

Chen, 19, later said the exercise wasn’t just for fun and relaxation but rather to see if he remembered how to play the instrument, on which he had achieved a solid level of proficiency nine years ago but played little since.

Judging from the video snippets Chen posted on Instagram, the answer is yes.

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