Nathan Chen’s Olympic redemption tour is halfway complete.
The free skate, and the handful of quads that come with it, are now all that stand between the American figure skater and gold.
Chen will get the chance to finish off his comeback in style Thursday afternoon in Beijing (Wednesday night stateside), entering the second half of the men’s competition with almost a six-point lead after crushing the short program on Tuesday.
“You can never really count out any of these athletes,” Chen told reporters. “The competition’s not one program. Whatever happens in the short program is not indicative of what will happen in the free program.”
But Chen did give himself some breathing room by putting together a record-breaking short program with 113.97 points — four years after his disastrous short program in Pyeongchang. He came back from that to ace the free skate with six quads, winning the program, but only finishing fifth in the overall competition.
Chen, who will take the ice last in the free skate at around 12:15 a.m. EST, is vying to become the first U.S. men’s singles figure skater to win gold (or medal at all) since Evan Lysacek in 2010. Before that, no American man had won Olympic gold in the singles competition since Scott Hamilton and Brian Boitano won back-to-back in 1984 and 1988.
In order to finish atop the podium, the 22-year-old Chen will have to fend off the field, led by a pair of Japanese figure skaters: Yuma Kagiyama (108.12) and Shoma Uno (105.90), who finished second and third, respectively, in the short program. Uno, who won silver at Pyeongchang, is the only skater in the field who has beaten Chen since 2018, placing second to Chen’s third in October’s Skate America. That event was won by American Vincent Zhou, who was forced to withdraw from the Olympics after testing positive for COVID-19 earlier this week.
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“I will add more complicated and difficult jumps in my free skating,” Uno told reporters, per the New York Times.
The biggest threat to Chen entering the competition appeared to be his rival, Yuzuru Hanyu, the two-time defending Olympic champ who won gold at Pyeongchang and Sochi. But the Japanese skater had a rough short program Tuesday, finishing eighth with 95.15 points, all but ending his chances of overcoming Chen.
“Knowing how it feels to skate — not necessarily to your potential but not what you anticipate skating — it doesn’t feel great, especially at an Olympics,” Chen said. “But you can never count Yuzu out. He’s a two-time Olympic champion, and no matter what he does in the future, he’s always going to be a figure skating icon.”
Chen, a student at Yale, also nailed his short program in the team event earlier in the week, helping USA capture a silver medal behind the Russian Olympic Committee. Entering Wednesday in Beijing, it was one of four silvers Team USA had collected along with a bronze, but it had yet to win gold in these Games.
“I was just elated,” Chen said after his short program Tuesday. “At the last Olympics, both of the short programs didn’t go the way I wanted. To finally get an opportunity to skate the programs I wanted feels really good.