In Nathan Chen’s Olympic Triumph, a Welcome Blast of Joy

In 2010, Nathan Chen of Salt Lake City, then a ten-year-old skating prodigy, talked to NBC Sports after competing at the U.S. Nationals Gala, to “Peter and the Wolf.” He was nearly four and a half feet tall. “Which Olympics are we going to see you in?” the reporter asked him. Chen smiled a little, looking polite. “Um, 2018, I think,” he said. We did see him in the 2018 Olympics. His performance wasn’t the kind of wild triumph that athletes and viewers hope for: he fell during the short program, and finished seventeenth. But last night Chen, whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from China in their twenties, skated with confidence, precision, and joy in Beijing, where his mother grew up. Chen, known as the Quad King—quadruple jumps galore—did this to an Elton John medley, rocket-manning around in an outfit that evoked the cosmos and the sweetly nerdy exuberance of childhood. When he flew into the air, spinning in those exacting lutzes, loops, and Salchows, he landed with stunning grace, beaming, with a fist pump or two. Not only did nothing bad happen but lots of good happened. And a grateful nation thanks him for it.

In Beijing, mid-Omicron, amid looming authoritarianism, there’s been a cloud of ambient tension hanging over the Olympic derring-do in the Bird’s Nest, the Ice Cube, and the ski jumps in the Nuclear Reactor Forest. (I know, I know, it’s an abandoned steel mill.) Amazing sporting feats abound, often serving as temporary distractions from some lurking menace. (Some lurking right there onscreen, pretending to fall asleep.) The hero-athletes, as if they don’t have enough to deal with, carry with them the emotions of a frazzled and exhausted nation. For us, the frazzled, the pleasures and perils of Olympics-watching have felt intensified: happy reunions with old friends (Chen, Chloe Kim, Mikaela Shiffrin, Shaun “All Grown Up” White), dazzling spins, and terrifying tumbles. Here a skier zooms backward to ascend like a bird; here a snowboarder clonks onto the half-pipe, face sliding down the cold curves. For the first few days, the Winter Olympics were interesting but harrowing; now we’ve achieved emotional blastoff.

Many of the sports narratives for American athletes have tended toward the redemptive, and so far seem to be resulting more in triumph than heartbreak. In the heartbreak category: Shiffrin, who has struggled in her events and been honest about her disappointment; and the figure skater Vincent Zhou, who had to withdraw after testing positive for COVID, and who spoke about the experience in a video, in which he seemed to resolutely fight off anguish. But Lindsey Jacobellis, of Connecticut, who’d been expected to win a gold in snowboard cross in 2006, at age twenty (but did not, owing in part to a celebratory move gone awry), won her first gold this week, at thirty-six. Kim, the teen gold-medallist snowboarding superstar of 2018, felt the strain of stardom, stepped back from snowboarding, and then made a gold-medal-winning half-pipe return; White, who has somehow become old (Thirty-five! Tidy haircut! Retiring soon!), stumbled a little before righting himself. And then there’s Nathan Chen.

In a tough but transformative year for athletes’ mental-health awareness, it’s been powerful seeing many intense young athletes deal with struggles by, essentially, taking a breath and trying to have fun with their sport again. In a profile for NBC’s morning shows, Chen is shown playing piano, talking about rhythm and emotion; in another segment, his “bestie,” the Olympic figure skater Mariah Bell, a friend since childhood, describes their low-key off-ice hangs, featuring game nights, guitar, and coloring books. An interviewer asks: Did she know that they’d go to the Olympics together? “I mean, I knew he’d be at the Olympics!” she says, laughing. The emphasis that these athletes place on being good to oneself is refreshing—even if, leading up to the Olympics, the rubrics for stories about Chen said things like “READY FOR REDEMPTION,” as if by falling in 2018 he’d committed a crime.

The skating events—announced by a team including, once again, the Olympians turned razzle-dazzle commentators Johnny Weir and Tara Lipinski—have been full of vivid pronouncements. (Of Yuma Kagiyama: “So youthful, so energetic! He skates with the speed of a hummingbird, and rotates like one, too.”) On Monday, we’d seen these competitors in the short program; last night was the free skate, the big, final shebang. The program saved Chen (“Arguably the best skater on the planet,” Weir said) for last. Before him came a cavalcade of international stars.

Jin Boyang, from Harbin, China, looking like a festive assassin (black pants, black gloves, flame-bedecked sequinned shirt), went first. Jin, a pioneer of the quadruple lutz with a triple toe loop, was greeted with a happy roar; he skated to “Bolero,” building drama as the music did, with the crowd occasionally clapping in rhythm. He executed a quad axel and a quad lutz with grace. Once, he finagled a tricky landing into a hop. Otherwise, to my eyes, he was magnificent. To Weir’s eyes, he was “lacking in terms of skating skills.” “He may have revolutionized this world technically,” Weir said, but Jin comes up short “artistically.” The emotion in the stadium was palpable, however. Jin, gloved hands on his face, looked up at the cheering crowd with tears in his eyes. Way to go, Jin.

Kévin Aymoz, from France, wearing a scoop-neck sophisticated-merman shirt, skated to M83 and incorporated a roundoff-like aerial flip. (“He knows how to treat his audience—it’s like he’s taking them out on the perfect date,” Lipinski said.) The Canadian American Keegan Messing, having recovered from COVID and skating for Canada, looked spectacularly northern in a plaid lumberjack shirt and belted black pants, showing off what Weir has insisted on calling his “marshmallowy knees.” In his final Olympics, the beloved two-time gold medallist Yuzuru Hanyu, of Japan, now twenty-seven, looked fiercely elegant and commanding, skated beautifully, and fell twice, once after a bold gambit: a quadruple axel, never before attempted at the Olympics, in which he vaulted up like Baryshnikhov, spun around and around like a corkscrew, and then landed on his butt. It was glorious and humbling, like the aging process. (“He’s a warrior, he’s a fighter,” Weir said.) The Russian teen-ager Evgeni Semenenko (more red and black, and dramatic Russian music) gave us an opportunity, through no fault of his own, to remember larger geopolitical vibes: reports that his R.O.C. teammate Kamila Valieva, the fifteen-year-old wunderkind, had tested positive for a banned substance in December. We’d been hearing about an ominous-sounding “legal issue” holding up the team-skating medal ceremony; this, it seemed, was it. A bummer all around.

The excitement ratcheted up toward the end of the men’s program: the American Jason Brown, from Highland Park, Illinois—who, the commentators frequently reminded us, does not do any quadruple jumps in competition—is exquisitely lovely to watch. I found myself thinking of Fred Astaire. (I’m not sure that I’ve ever been so captivated while beholding a man wearing gray.) The twenty-year-old Cha Jun-hwan, of South Korea, skated to “Nessun Dorma,” thrillingly and dramatically, temporarily landing in second place even after a rough-looking early fall attempting his quad toe. (It was fun to see him consulting with his coach, Brian Orser, of Battle of the Brians fame, who was wearing a Team Korea jacket.) Japan’s Shoma Uno, the reigning Olympic silver medallist, looked wonderfully intent (“Under the bright lights of competition, he’s like a bear at spring thaw,” Weir said), and gave a knockout performance, with five quads, to another, different “Bolero.” Just as Lipinski was praising his wildness, he fell; Weir remarked upon his “buttery knees.” Kagiyama, eighteen, from Yokohama, seemed to float through his routine with a lightness and speed only he could claim—O.K., fine, he’s a hummingbird. “Johnny, I feel like he skates with a trail of sparkles behind him,” Lipinski said. At the kiss-and-cry, Kagiyama sailed to the top spot.

Before Chen’s skate, NBC presented a little segment in which the Olympic gold-medallist skaters Scott Hamilton, Brian Boitano, and Evan Lysacek talked about him (he’s great, they concur), and to him, through the camera, like when the former Presidents band together. Boitano said, of winning the gold, “It’s surreal, because you can’t believe that something that wonderful can be happening to you.” He added, “The advice I would give Nathan is to stay in the moment.”

As Chen skated onto the ice in his charmingly dorky pink-and-orange space-themed shirt, its collar hinting at “Star Trek,” he looked confident, comfortable, and handsome, on top of everything else—and not even a little freaked out. “Literally billions of people around the world are watching him have this moment, the biggest moment of his life,” Weir said.

“Best skater in the world,” the commentator Terry Gannon said. “Is it his time?” Chen was announced in English and Chinese, in his mother’s home town, and he spread his arms and smiled. He began his routine, and I was too mesmerized by his quad flips to care that he was skating to a medley from the “Rocketman” soundtrack—Elton John, but not Elton John. A sombre bit of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” featuring a quad Salchow, morphed so subtly and unexpectedly along with Chen’s movements that when he launched into the air with a quad Lutz, perfectly timed to the sudden, wowing ascent of “Rocket Man,” I found myself actually astonished by delight, transported beyond my East Village couch, barely believing my eyes. As Chen sailed around the ice, doing his quad toes and triple axels, his movements became free and triumphant. By the end, he was rocking out to a hip-hoppified “Benny and the Jets,” seeming to combine the playfulness of a teen-ager and the wonder of a boy and the confidence of a man. I watched his routine over and over, just for the fun of it, and it wowed me every time.