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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Bradie Tennell returns to U.S. Figure Skating Championships after nightmarish comeback

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Bradie Tennell returns to U.S. Figure Skating Championships after nightmarish comeback

Bradie Tennell was ready. Her bags were packed for an early October trip to the Japan Open, an event that had would have symbolic resonance for her. It was to bring a traumatic part of her life full circle toward its end.

Tennell would be returning to figure skating competition in the same country where she had last competed 20 months earlier, at the 2021 World Team Trophy, before a right foot injury that frustratingly defied diagnosis.  The two-time U.S. champion had missed an entire competitive season, missed a chance at going to a second Olympics, missed the part of her identity that was Bradie Tennell the athlete.

It was the day before she was to leave for Japan. Tennell was practicing at her new training base in Nice, France, where she moved last September from her home in suburban Chicago (before her injury, she had been training in Colorado Springs). She was hoping such a dramatic change could bring renewed energy to her oft-delayed comeback.

Tennell had been training well, regularly doing clean program run-throughs in practice. She had been able to work her way back slowly and deliberately, with a schedule that allowed her to be patient.

And then, in her words, “something weird” happened on the landing of a triple toe loop jump. And now she had pain in her left foot, and the trip to Japan was off, as was a planned trip to Hungary for the Budapest Trophy a week after the Japan Open, as was … another season?

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Figure skating champion Bradie Tennell, a competitive ‘shark,’ making comeback in new waters

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Figure skating champion Bradie Tennell, a competitive ‘shark,’ making comeback in new waters

A week after chronic foot pain forced Bradie Tennell to withdraw from the 2022 U.S. Figure Skating Championships, the impact of that situation hit her full force.

Tennell was the defending national champion, a good bet to make the 2022 Olympic team had she been healthy. But she was lying in bed in her family home in the Chicago suburbs as nationals was going on in Nashville.

She had lost the chance to realize her dream of skating in another Olympic Games. She had lost an entire competitive season. Then she realized a fundamental part of her also had been lost when walking to the kitchen became so painful it was easier to stay hungry until someone could bring her food.

“In my core, I’m an athlete,” Tennell said via telephone in an interview last week. “I take so much pride in being able to demand pretty much anything of my body and being able to do it. If I want to go on a 10-mile hike, I can go on a 10-mile hike. This was like my identity as an athlete being so suddenly ripped away.”

This lengthy phone and text interview was the first time the two-time U.S. champion and 2018 Olympian had spoken at length about what she described as an “honestly traumatic experience.”

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In return to Yale, Nathan Chen goes back to his future

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In return to Yale, Nathan Chen goes back to his future

When Nathan Chen returns to Yale late this summer after a two-year leave of absence, his housing arrangement will make Chen think he is going back to the future.

“I feel like I’m a returning first-year,” said Chen, actually a rising junior.

He has a room on Yale’s Old Campus, where the residence halls are primarily occupied by first-year students. It is where he lived the first time around after matriculating in the 2018-19 academic year.

The difference this time is Chen also wants to feel present on campus in a way he could not during his first two years of college, when he jammed studies and an international figure skating career into days that seemed too short.

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With a surprising medal at worlds, Vincent Zhou starts to step out of his Olympic pit

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With a surprising medal at worlds, Vincent Zhou starts to step out of his Olympic pit

Vincent Zhou apologized a couple days ago for sounding like a broken record, stuck at the point of describing his Olympic nightmare, a story that sounded just as poignant and painful in every retelling.

The fates conspired to overwhelm Zhou last month in Beijing, leaving him to deal with the sadness of missed opportunities while spending a week in COVID-19 quarantine.

It was bad enough that a positive COVID-19 test forced him to withdraw from the singles competition after having helped the U.S. finish second to the Russian Olympic Committee in the team event. Then he lost the chance to celebrate the team medal in Beijing because the doping case involving Russian Kamila Valieva meant that medal presentation has been delayed until it is resolved, likely several months from now.

Finally, there was insult added to injury: when Zhou tried to board the bus for the Closing Ceremony, where he hoped to find some redemptive joy in his Olympic experience, an official said he had been identified as a COVID-19 close contact and could not go.

Three weeks later, waking up with the sense of being in what he called a “bottomless pit,” Zhou told his agent and coaches and others close to him that he felt his whole career has been a failure and for nothing.

In that mental state, he was ready to drop out of the World Championships in Montpellier, France, until another emotion took over, the feeling of not wanting to live with the regret of not having tried. Somehow, Zhou pulled himself together to do more than just try, and he wound up skating well enough to win the bronze medal, a result that reminded the two-time Olympian not to lose faith in himself.

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