Chen's autobiography provides a rare revelatory look at the man who won Olympic skating gold a year ago

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Chen's autobiography provides a rare revelatory look at the man who won Olympic skating gold a year ago

The idea of covering figure skating is something of a contradiction in terms.

Oxymoronic, if you will, like covering all individual sports, in which athletes compete infrequently, train all over the world, and the media rarely sees them in practice.  A far cry from my experiences covering pro football, baseball and hockey, when I saw the athletes nearly every day. The latter is what a journalist thinks of as covering a sport.

I wrote about Nathan Chen’s figure skating career for seven years, beginning with the 2016 U.S. Championships, which would be one of his many history-making performances.

I saw him only at competitions, when the chances to have insightful conversations are minimal.

Even though Chen was gracious enough to do several one-on-one telephone interviews with me, they were generally brief – even if he always spoke so fast you could get 20-minutes-worth of answers in a 15-minute call.

So I never had any misconceptions about really knowing Chen or his family or what he (and they) went through in the nearly 20 years between his putting on skates for the first time and his winning the men’s singles gold medal at the Olympics exactly one year ago.

Sure, there snippets of “revelations,” one coming soon after Chen’s Olympic triumph when his coach, Rafael Arutunian, mentioned giving Chen back money his mother had paid for lessons because he knew how pressed they were for funds.  And, in doing a story about his years taking ballet, I learned from his teachers what a quick study and gifted dancer he was.

But how little I or anyone outside the shy Chen’s inner circle knew about him became apparent in reading his recently published autobiography, “One Jump at a Time,” written with Time magazine’s Alice Park.

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Still just 16, Alysa Liu has met the challenges of going from insouciant prodigy to world medalist

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Still just 16, Alysa Liu has met the challenges of going from insouciant prodigy to world medalist

You look at Alysa Liu, and you see a 16-year-old with braces, and it doesn’t seem possible she still is that young because of how much has happened to her in the past four years, all of it in the public eye.

Liu has gone through adolescence under the relentless glare of a spotlight she attracted in January 2019, at age 13, by becoming the youngest U.S. women’s singles champion ever. She was a prodigy who would bear huge expectations for two seasons before she was even eligible to compete at the senior level in her sport.

It all was so easy at the start, with one landmark achievement after another, a second U.S. title in 2020, victories on the Junior Grand Prix circuit, history-making triple axel and quadruple jumps.

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Figure skating at 2022 Olympics a trip - from sublime to absurd to sublime

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Figure skating at 2022 Olympics a trip - from sublime to absurd to sublime

It all started routinely, with a team event in which the medalists finished in the expected order (ROC-USA-JPN), and Russian Olympic Committee’s Kamila Valieva unsurprisingly became the first woman to land a quadruple jump in the Olympics.

After that, the 2022 Winter Olympics figure skating competition went from the sublime to the absurd to the sublime.

The team event was over only a day when the cancellation of its formal medal ceremony led to a week in which doping (especially Russia’s doping), pitiless training methods and the sad collapse of Valieva, the 15-year-old at the center of the story, turned into a firestorm as depressing as it was devastating.

Within a few hours of a story by Olympic specialist website Inside the Games that a legal issue about doping had prevented the team event medals from being presented, the website reported the case involved Valieva, the heavy favorite in women’s singles.

Valieva’s positive doping result from a December test, the bureaucratic laxity that followed, the decision that allowed her to compete in singles – it all brought recrimination, tears, anger and numbness as Valieva staggered under the weight of it, and the world watched in dismay.

How sadly bizarre was it that Court of Arbitration for Sport rulings on figure skating matters were as significant as nearly anything that happened on the ice?

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From Michelle Kwan to Nathan Chen, passing an Olympic torch of representation

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From Michelle Kwan to Nathan Chen, passing an Olympic torch of representation

Nathan Chen has talked frequently about the motivational impact of growing up in Salt Lake City, where reminders of the 2002 Winter Games were widely visible around town throughout his childhood. He began skating at 3, not long after watching snippets of NBC’s Olympic broadcasts.

What captivated Chen equally was seeing -- both at the Olympics and in the following years -- a skater who was not only a champion but also a person who looked like him ... and his four siblings ... and his Chinese immigrant parents ... and others in the Chinese-American community.

That was Michelle Kwan, one of the most decorated and most admired skaters in history, who won an Olympic bronze medal in 2002 -- and, coincidentally, the third of her nine U.S. titles in Salt Lake City three months before Chen was born in 1999.

In interviews following his Olympic triumph Thursday, the first gold medal by a singles skater of Chinese ethnicity, Chen acknowledged more than once how much Kwan had meant to his career as a figure skater.

"Growing up in Salt Lake City and having a face like Michelle Kwan is very inspirational," he said. "Having an athlete that looks like you gives you the hope you can do the same. Michelle Kwan is certainly that for me. That goes back to the power of representation."

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