Moving forward, Ilia Malinin intends to skate at world meet in March

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Moving forward, Ilia Malinin intends to skate at world meet in March

Ilia Malinin's agent, Ari Zakarian, confirmed in a text message on Sunday that Malinin "will do" the World Championships in Prague from March 26-29.

Malinin has won the last two world titles and was a huge favorite for Olympic gold, but finished 8th after being, in his words, "overwhelmed" by Olympic pressure in Friday's free skate.  He staggered to 15th in the free after having won the short program.

“I blew it,” he told NBC’s Andrea Joyce.

Malinin deserves props, however, for the way he handled the disappointment in facing multiple media interviews while the award ceremonies went on without him.

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In pushing each other, Hanyu and Chen have redefined the meaning of figure skating greatness

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In pushing each other, Hanyu and Chen have redefined the meaning of figure skating greatness

The figure skating rivalry between Nathan Chen of the United States and Yuzuru Hanyu of Japan is enduring, but sporadic. Compelling, but infrequent.

Hanyu is the two-time reigning Olympic gold medalist. Chen has won the last three world titles. But they have met in the same individual competition just nine times over six seasons.

And that only makes the rivalry more compelling. Absence makes the heat grow stronger.

Never will it be more intense than next Monday, when Hanyu and Chen begin skating for the men’s singles title at the 2022 Winter Olympics.

What happens next week can only embellish Hanyu’s legacy. By becoming in 2018 the first man to win consecutive Olympic gold medals in singles since Dick Button of the United States in 1952, Hanyu already became a permanent member of a pantheon open to few.

Chen, yet to win an individual Olympic medal, is seeking a career-defining singles gold. Even if he gets it, Chen understands his rival’s place in the sport’s history will remain distinct.

“He is in a completely different status than I am as a skater,” Chen told me before this season began. “I will always respect that.”

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Brilliance at nationals unsurprisingly not enough to earn Ilia Malinin an Olympic spot

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Brilliance at nationals unsurprisingly not enough to earn Ilia Malinin an Olympic spot

Nathan Chen won his sixth straight national figure skating championship Sunday, a feat unmatched since Dick Button won his sixth of seven straight in 1951.

Ilia Malinin finished second, but he upstaged Chen and everyone else in the competition, both in the short program and the free skate.

That Malinin’s two stunning performances still did not earn the 17-year-old a place on the U.S. team for next month’s Winter Olympics in Beijing was not really surprising, given selection criteria that broadly favored results in senior level events the past two seasons.

In a decision complicated by the free skate performances in Nashville, the U.S. Figure Skating selection committee gave the three men’s singles spots to Chen, Vincent Zhou and Jason Brown.

“I think all three of us have really shown over the past two years why we deserve this spot,” Chen said.

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By the numbers, Nathan Chen’s jumps add up to a new dimension of skating

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By the numbers, Nathan Chen’s jumps add up to a new dimension of skating

Having basically exhausted the English language’s supply of superlatives to describe Nathan Chen’s skating over the past three seasons, I woke up Sunday morning looking for other ways to find context for what seemed his almost certain fifth straight U.S. title.

Without more than a gut feeling, which was intensified by his commanding execution Saturday of the most technically difficult short program he had done since 2018, I had a sense that Chen has had a remarkable success rate for several years in programs packed with the toughest array of jumps anyone ever has tried in the sport.

So, with the help of the data mining genius behind the invaluable web site skatingscores.com (who prefers anonymity), I set off to dredge through old scoring protocols to see whether statistical evidence supported my intuition about how consistently good Chen’s jumping has been during an unbeaten streak in 12 individual live competitions that began with the 2018 World Championships.

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In making history with fifth straight U.S. title, Nathan Chen competes against his own singular past

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In making history with fifth straight U.S. title, Nathan Chen competes against his own singular past

The trouble with being Nathan Chen is, nearly all the time, you are being judged against your past brilliance.

Unless the redoubtable two-time reigning Olympic champion Yuzuru Hanyu of Japan is in the competition, that is.

But the two have met just twice since the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics, with Chen winning both, and pandemic-born uncertainty over the fate of the 2021 World Championships, currently scheduled for late March in Stockholm, and perhaps even next season’s events makes it is impossible to know when the next Chen-Hanyu showdown will take place.

Chen has simply been so extraordinary for so long and has dominated U.S. men’s skating so thoroughly since 2017 that it is getting too easy (and unfair) to take him for granted and forget he commandingly won a historic fifth straight U.S. title Sunday in Las Vegas because he did it with a less-than-jaw-dropping free skate.

A modest (by only his own standards) winning score of 322.28 still left Chen more than 30 points ahead of runner-up Vincent Zhou (291.38), a national medalist for the fourth time, this one after a one-year absence from the podium. Jason Brown, the 2015 U.S. champion was third (276.92), his sixth medal at nationals.

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