Reigning champ Nathan Chen doesn’t hide his anxieties about getting to, competing at figure skating worlds in Sweden

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Reigning champ Nathan Chen doesn’t hide his anxieties about getting to, competing at figure skating worlds in Sweden

Nathan Chen could have given a blandly optimistic answer to a question of whether he had any concerns over the long flight (with a connection) to get him from Los Angeles to Stockholm for next week’s World Figure Skating Championships.

Chen could have given a similarly anodyne response to a question about his concerns about staying safe and healthy once he is on the ground in Sweden for nine days.

But during a Zoom teleconference last week, the two-time defending world champion chose not to do either a Pollyanna or a Pinocchio about issues related to travel and the competition environment at a worlds taking place during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Using new recognition from social media, Elladj Baldé champions skaters of color

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Using new recognition from social media, Elladj Baldé champions skaters of color

Figure skater Elladj Baldé and his fiancée, dancer-choreographer Michelle Dawley, were driving in their Calgary, Alberta, neighborhood in mid-December when they noticed a patch of open ice in a field. It was deep into the pandemic lockdown, when places to skate were hard to come by, and Baldé, who had his skates in the car, wanted to commemorate the find.

“Let’s make a video,” Baldé said.

As Dawley recorded on an iPhone, Baldé pulled on his skates, ran out of his car across snow-covered grass and onto the ice, did a celebratory backflip, then some hip-hop dance moves. His open plaid shirt flapped over a hoodie, and his enthusiasm poured out.

The recording took 10 minutes, from filming to laying in music by Rihanna. It became 20 seconds on TikTok, where Baldé said he had only a couple hundred followers at the time.

That – and Baldé’s life – would change quickly.

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At Beijing Winter Games, now just a year away, figure skating will be a morning and evening affair (as you read here last March)

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At Beijing Winter Games, now just a year away, figure skating will be a morning and evening affair (as you read here last March)

Under usual circumstances, the day marking one year to go until the next Olympics directs a substantial amount of attention toward the upcoming Games.

But there is nothing usual about the current circumstances of a world turned inside out by the Covid-19 pandemic. So the next Olympics is not the 2022 Winter Games in China, where competition begins with curling Feb. 2, 2022, which is one year from today (the Opening Ceremony is a year from Friday).

Next up is the postponed 2020 Tokyo Summer Games. Beijing 2022 seems much further off than it is.

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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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