Chen’s free skate was nearly impeccable, and it showed why he is a three-time world champion considered the best skater in the world. He has lost only once since winning the 2018 worlds. That was the year he was at his lowest a month earlier, when he came into the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics hyped as the next great American champion but failed to live up to those expectations, or his own.
Stumbling in the short program, he was out of medal contention even before the free skate. But he rose to fifth place from 17th with a spectacular free skate that he said changed his perspective on the sport, and on life. It wasn’t the end of the world, he concluded, when he didn’t win Olympic gold at 18. It was, in a way, a new beginning.
Chen studied at Yale for two years while continuing to compete on the international stage, expanding his horizons beyond the world of skating he had known since he started competing as a boy, the youngest of five Chen siblings.
Back then, his life had revolved around the sport. When he was about 11, he began training under the coach Rafael Arutyunyan in California, first traveling to sessions there from his home in Salt Lake City by car with his mother. The Chens would sleep in their car on those trips, he said, because a hotel room was an unmanageable expense.
Arutyunyan quickly saw promise in the young Chen, but he knew that the boy’s parents — Chinese immigrants who had arrived in the United States in the late 1980s — did not have the resources to finance an expensive elite skating career. So when Nathan’s mother, Hetty Wang, would scrape up money to pay Arutyunyan with cash, the coach would sometimes hand it right back to Nathan.
The coach knew Chen had the makings of a champion, and the two got along because, as Arutyunyan said on Thursday, Chen liked that he was a straightforward, not-so-cuddly coach.