Chen's autobiography provides a rare revelatory look at the man who won Olympic skating gold a year ago

/
Chen's autobiography provides a rare revelatory look at the man who won Olympic skating gold a year ago

The idea of covering figure skating is something of a contradiction in terms.

Oxymoronic, if you will, like covering all individual sports, in which athletes compete infrequently, train all over the world, and the media rarely sees them in practice.  A far cry from my experiences covering pro football, baseball and hockey, when I saw the athletes nearly every day. The latter is what a journalist thinks of as covering a sport.

I wrote about Nathan Chen’s figure skating career for seven years, beginning with the 2016 U.S. Championships, which would be one of his many history-making performances.

I saw him only at competitions, when the chances to have insightful conversations are minimal.

Even though Chen was gracious enough to do several one-on-one telephone interviews with me, they were generally brief – even if he always spoke so fast you could get 20-minutes-worth of answers in a 15-minute call.

So I never had any misconceptions about really knowing Chen or his family or what he (and they) went through in the nearly 20 years between his putting on skates for the first time and his winning the men’s singles gold medal at the Olympics exactly one year ago.

Sure, there snippets of “revelations,” one coming soon after Chen’s Olympic triumph when his coach, Rafael Arutunian, mentioned giving Chen back money his mother had paid for lessons because he knew how pressed they were for funds.  And, in doing a story about his years taking ballet, I learned from his teachers what a quick study and gifted dancer he was.

But how little I or anyone outside the shy Chen’s inner circle knew about him became apparent in reading his recently published autobiography, “One Jump at a Time,” written with Time magazine’s Alice Park.

Read More

Living in two worlds at once, Camden Pulkinen seeks first U.S. Championships medal

/
Living in two worlds at once, Camden Pulkinen seeks first U.S. Championships medal

ore difficult since last August.

“About tenfold more difficult,” he said.

For the previous six years, when he lived and trained in Colorado Springs, Pulkinen had a five-minute drive to a rink where the elite figure skaters had almost unlimited ice time. He had finished high school online and then had taken in-person and online college courses at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs essentially on his own schedule. .

When I spoke to him early last week, that life seemed a distant memory. Now he is up at the crack of dawn to get from Columbia University’s Manhattan campus to the Chelsea Piers Sky Rink, where he begins his daily training between 8 and 8:30, and the ice time available to him ends at 11:20. That trip involves 14 stops on the 7th Avenue subway and then a mile-long walk to the rink, and it takes between 50 and 55 minutes.

When his training ends, Pulkinen does the trip in reverse to begin his day as a sophomore at the Ivy League university.

“The mental oscillation between getting through a long program and then rushing yourself to a class and having to learn about calculus is something,” Pulkinen said.

It is what the 22-year-old from Scottsdale, Ariz., signed up for when he decided to continue his figure skating career through the 2026 Olympic season and become a full-time, on-campus student after having deferred his matriculation at Columbia for a year.

Read More

Jason Brown returns to figure skating, and a Toronto basement, with an ‘Impossible Dream’

/
Jason Brown returns to figure skating, and a Toronto basement, with an ‘Impossible Dream’

In June, figure skater Jason Brown moved all his belongings out of the Toronto basement apartment where he had lived most of the last four years while training to make the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. He brought everything back to his family home north of Chicago, where nearly all those possessions – and his car – remain.

“No part of me thought I was coming back to Toronto,” Brown told me in a recent phone conversation.

Why would he have? Brown, 28 next month, had been in Toronto to work with coaches Tracy Wilson and Brian Orser on preparing for competitions. That lengthy phase of his skating career, with 12 years as a senior competitor and suitcases full of medals and achievements, seemed to be over with his solid sixth-place finish in the men’s singles event in China.

Brown had wearied of the blinkered perspective and single-minded focus necessary to be an elite competitive skater. He wanted to immerse himself more deeply in the other sides of skating, using his nonpareil artistry and body awareness to be a choreographer, to be a frequent and innovative show skater, to lay groundwork for the hope of one day producing his own show and having a skating camp.

None of those endeavors needed him to be based in Toronto.

And yet there he was in Toronto when we talked, back in the basement apartment with one suitcase of belongings, back training at the Cricket Club for his next competition, the U.S. Championships in late January, back with a frame of mind in which skating at the 2026 Winter Games is a far-off but not far-fetched thought.

Read More

In return to Yale, Nathan Chen goes back to his future

/
In return to Yale, Nathan Chen goes back to his future

When Nathan Chen returns to Yale late this summer after a two-year leave of absence, his housing arrangement will make Chen think he is going back to the future.

“I feel like I’m a returning first-year,” said Chen, actually a rising junior.

He has a room on Yale’s Old Campus, where the residence halls are primarily occupied by first-year students. It is where he lived the first time around after matriculating in the 2018-19 academic year.

The difference this time is Chen also wants to feel present on campus in a way he could not during his first two years of college, when he jammed studies and an international figure skating career into days that seemed too short.

Read More

Under the circumstances, figure skating worlds – and future – hard to assess

/
Under the circumstances, figure skating worlds – and future – hard to assess

Even in normal times, it always has been hard to draw a lot of conclusions from the World Figure Skating Championships that immediately follow the Olympics.

The rigors of an Olympic season lead many medalists to take a pass on worlds. Those who do compete often are obviously fatigued.

It is exponentially harder to assess the competition that ended Saturday in Montpellier, France.

No world meet has taken place in more abnormal circumstances.

Read More