Redemptive performance keeps demons at bay for Nathan Chen

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Redemptive performance keeps demons at bay for Nathan Chen

GANGNEUNG, South Korea - It was the most significant performance to this point in Nathan Chen's competitive skating career.

And Chen's redemptive Olympic free skate Saturday may turn out to be the most significant in his entire career.

"I'm glad I was able to show myself, and everyone else, I can bounce back from a bad performance," Chen said.

To have finished his debut Olympics with nothing to temperhaving done so poorly in the team event and individual short programs would have been a burden Chen couldn't have shaken until 2022 -- if ever.

"These kind of things haunt you," 1992 Olympic silver medalist Paul Wylie said.

Chen, 18, not only exorcised the demons-in-waiting -- he also wound up making Olympic history, winning the free skate by a whopping 8.91-point margin over repeat gold medalist Yuzuru Hanyu of Japan. His performance moved him from 17th after the short to fifth overall but, more important, allowed him to step into a future that again seems as bright as the one everyone has envisioned for him.

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Quad revolution Chan helped start swept away his medal hopes, but not his legacy

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Quad revolution Chan helped start swept away his medal hopes, but not his legacy

GANGNEUNG, South Korea - In his 12 years at the senior level of figure skating, Canada's Patrick Chan has been a transformative athlete.

"I am never going to look at Patrick as anything but a three-time world champion who was the first man to do beautiful skating and multiple quads," said four-time world champion and fellow Canadian Kurt Browning. "He was alpha dog for a long time."

What Browning could not include in that encomium is the one thing missing from Chan's much-decorated career: an individual Olympic gold medal. He let it slip from his grasp in 2014, and it seems out of his reach in the men's competition that begins with the short program Friday morning.

When Chan got his first Olympic gold medal Monday, it was for the team event, in which he had two mistake-riddled performances. That could have made it seem a bittersweet prize, but he refused to see it that way.

"At the end of the day, a medal is a medal," Chan insisted. "I'm going to hold this medal tight to me. That's how I am going to see it. That's how I am going to enjoy it."

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Hanyu: 'I want to give a dream performance'

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Hanyu: 'I want to give a dream performance'

GANGNEUNG, South Korea - This was a moment the Japanese press had waited three months for.

It had been agonizing for them to go that long starved of any real contact with Yuzuru Hanyu, the 23-year-old skater their country adores, the skater who also has won fans worldwide with his boyish charm and unsurpassed excellence in the sport since winning the Olympic title four years ago.

So, along with a few foreign colleagues, Japanese media filled the 150 seats in the Gangneung Ice Arena press conference room Tuesday morning. A few dozen others stood. Camera shutters hummed like cicadas on a hot summer afternoon.

The press conference lasted 23 minutes, with nearly half that time taken for translating questions and answers from Japanese to English. But the chance to hear Hanyu say anything more than hello was enough after a virtual radio silence that had lasted since he injured a ligament in his right ankle on a fall at an NHK Trophy practice session Nov. 9.

His hair still flopped into his eyes. He smiled easily.

"He's in great spirits," his coach, Brian Orser, said.

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Nathan Chen's much-anticipated Olympic debut becomes a flop

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Nathan Chen's much-anticipated Olympic debut becomes a flop

GANGNEUNG, South Korea -- When he stopped skating, Nathan Chen lowered his head and quickly ran a hand through his hair. His face was blank. If something was churning inside him, Chen kept it bottled up.

"It wasn't shock," Chen said of his reaction. "It was more disappointment, the fact I didn't do what I want to do. I'm not going to show that I'm happy and kind of fake it if I'm genuinely not."

Chen truly had nothing to be happy about when it came to his performance. His highly anticipated Olympic debut Friday morning in the short program of the team event was a flop.

It was Chen's lowest-scored short program, by some five points, in two years as an international senior skater. None of his three jumping passes went either clean or as planned. He fell on a triple axel. He also turned a planned second quadruple jump into a double, giving him no points on that element because at least a solo triple jump is required.

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For Nathan Chen, some confidence-building leaps, times five

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For Nathan Chen, some confidence-building leaps, times five

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- It sounds a bit crazy to say this about a guy who had won all four of his events this season prior to the 2018 U.S. Figure Skating Championships, but Nathan Chen has been struggling.

Struggling, that is, by the ice-breaking standards he set while becoming figure skating's newest star last season.

So his strong performance in Saturday night's free skate inside San Jose's SAP Center meant more than just making him a runaway national champion for the second straight year and earning the 2018 Olympic team spot that has been a foregone conclusion.

Chen matched his historic five-clean-quad free skate of a year ago at nationals, and it was his first such performance this season. In each of his previous two competitions, the Grand Prix Final and Skate America, only two of his five planned quads were clean.

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