The 22-year-old followed his record short program at the Beijing Games with a near-perfect free skate.
BEIJING - Nathan Chen remembers making the long drive with his mother from his home in Utah to Rafael Arutyunyan’s training base in Southern California. He had started out in figure skating just a few years earlier, using his sister’s skates and sleeping in the car to follow his Olympic dreams.With a nearly perfect free skate on the heels of a record-setting short program, the 22-year-old Yale student walked away with the gold medal at the Beijing Games on Thursday.
Inside historic Capital Indoor Stadium in China, the nation both his parents immigrated from, Chen landed all five of his quads during his “Rocketman” program set to the soaring film score by Elton John. The statistics and data science major finished with an insurmountable total of 332.60 points, just three off his own world record and 22 points ahead of his closest competition. Yuma Kagiyama and Shoma Uno of Japan took silver and bronze.
“I mean, I don’t really feel like I’m the most qualified person to talk about it,” Chen said. “Whatever ends up being the case will be the case, but I’m still wrapped up in what I was able to do today.” Performing to “Bolero,” one of the most popular musical selections of the Beijing Games, Uno under-rotated a quad salchow and quad toe loop, then was dinged for his combination spin late in the program to finish with 293 points.
The lyrics to “Rocketman” that played through the old home of ping-pong diplomacy — “And I think it’s gonna be a long, long time, ‘til touchdown brings me ‘round again” — seemed altogether fitting for the moment.
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