With a likely Olympic team medal, Karen Chen can fill another gap in her career record

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With a likely Olympic team medal, Karen Chen can fill another gap in her career record

Karen Chen was talking before the U.S. Figure Skating Championships about filling a blank on her résumé.

“I told myself, `Karen, you don’t have a nationals silver medal yet,’” Chen said.

Coincidentally – and you will see the coincidence a few paragraphs from now – Chen noted that in answer to a question on a different topic.

It was the question of whether she hoped her performance at nationals would be good enough to earn her a spot in the Olympic team event. Chen did not get that opportunity at her first Olympics in 2018.

There was an element of not counting chickens in Chen’s response, of being more concerned about first assuring the place on the 2022 Olympic team.

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Nathan Chen makes a statement with commanding short program in Olympic team event

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Nathan Chen makes a statement with commanding short program in Olympic team event

Nathan Chen’s short program to the Charles Aznavour song “La Boheme” includes a passage with an expressive emotional release, his mouth clenched into a grimace, his eyes afire with the passion and longing of the artist the lyrics describe.

The emotion in that choreographed expression during the team event short program Friday morning at the 2022 Winter Olympics also spoke of a different release than the one Chen needed simply to inhabit the role he was interpreting.

Chen seemed to be letting go of all the frustration and disappointment that had followed his stunningly poor performances in the team event and individual event short programs during his Olympic debut four years ago.

“It feels good to have a short program that I actually skated well in an Olympic experience,” Chen said.

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Brilliance at nationals unsurprisingly not enough to earn Ilia Malinin an Olympic spot

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Brilliance at nationals unsurprisingly not enough to earn Ilia Malinin an Olympic spot

Nathan Chen won his sixth straight national figure skating championship Sunday, a feat unmatched since Dick Button won his sixth of seven straight in 1951.

Ilia Malinin finished second, but he upstaged Chen and everyone else in the competition, both in the short program and the free skate.

That Malinin’s two stunning performances still did not earn the 17-year-old a place on the U.S. team for next month’s Winter Olympics in Beijing was not really surprising, given selection criteria that broadly favored results in senior level events the past two seasons.

In a decision complicated by the free skate performances in Nashville, the U.S. Figure Skating selection committee gave the three men’s singles spots to Chen, Vincent Zhou and Jason Brown.

“I think all three of us have really shown over the past two years why we deserve this spot,” Chen said.

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Gracie Gold’s comeback yields its most fruitful success in nationals short program

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Gracie Gold’s comeback yields its most fruitful success in nationals short program

It is simple, really, what Gracie Gold wanted out of her eighth and possibly final appearance at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships.

“This nationals for me is the cherry on top of what I consider a pretty successful comeback attempt,” Gold said a day before the women’s singles event began with the short program Thursday in Nashville.

Truth be told, just coming back constituted a considerable success for Gold, given the multiple issues – eating disorders, depression, anxiety – she had dealt with for several years. She missed the 2018 and 2019 nationals and battled just to qualify each of the past three seasons.

At 26, Gold came to this one in a better place competitively than she had been in a long time. At her final qualifying event last November in Georgia, she showed flashes in her short program of the skater who had won national titles in 2014 and 2016 and finished fourth in the 2014 Olympics.

“I’ve had lots of good training over the past two or three months,” Gold said Wednesday. “I have been really proud of myself and my team and all the hard work that we’ve done, so my goal is to really show that and kind of show off a little bit like old times.

“The short program in Georgia was really nice and long overdue. I hope to have a similar outcome tomorrow.”

This one was even nicer – on the score sheet and in the way Gold reacted, a wide smile on her face for nearly the final minute of a 2-minute, 40-second program that ended with the crowd at Bridgestone Arena on its feet to applaud.

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Keeping promise to herself, figure skater Karen Chen looks for an Olympic redo

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Keeping promise to herself, figure skater Karen Chen looks for an Olympic redo

Karen Chen left the 2018 Winter Olympics so disappointed over the subpar performances that left her in 11th place that she immediately vowed to try again.

“When I got off the ice, I remember telling myself, `You’ve got to go for another four years. This was not your dream,’” Chen said in a recent media conference.

Yet a season later, after battling an injury that kept her out of all but one minor competition, Chen no longer was so sure.

She had been admitted to Cornell University, which would mean both training far from her coaching team in Colorado Springs and chasing around near the college to find ice time. She had struggled with boot-related foot problems for years. She had accomplished the original part of her dream, which was simply making the Olympics.

Before her first semester of college, Chen thought about calling it a competitive career at age 19. She had a family meeting to discuss the issue and wound up deciding both to give it another go and also that she wanted to be a full-time student at the Ithaca, New York, school.

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