‘I ENDED ON MY TERMS’
Canadian champion finishes off the podium in his final Olympic appearance
GANGNEUNG, SOUTH KOREA It goes like this. Not fourth. Not fifth. With no major falls and a minor lift from a crowd that remembers him fondly and wished him well, the baffled former king of figure skating took his final twirl and hoped it was enough to move him onto the podium.
But his was not a victory march. Nor was it a cold and broken Hallelujah.
Canadian champion Patrick Chan said goodbye with all his trademark class and precise footwork, but not nearly enough of the airborne tricks necessary to compete mano a mano with the likes of Yuzuru Hanyu, Nathan Chen, Shoma Uno and the elegant Javier Fernandez, the mostly younger men who populate the podium most often these days.
“I’m really happy because I kind of ended on my terms,” he said. “I’m in the best shape of my career. I’m the best technically I’ve been and I’m the happiest athlete I’ve ever been throughout my skating career.
“This is the best Olympic experience out of the three,” he continued. “I was in control. I was not dying out of breath. I had no fear. I feel great. I feel happy. I feel only positive.”
He stumbled through his Olympic finale, a hand down here, a two-foot there, enough to send him tumbling down from sixth, not up. He landed two quads but scored just 173.42.
All around him are men who try three and four and five, and yes, even six quads.
Chen did the previously unthinkable, laying down a six-quad extravaganza, five of them clean, to score 215.08 points and rise from 17th place after a completely botched short program.
His teammate Vincent Zhou threw five quads at the judges, four clean, and rocketed up from 12th.
But Hanyu had the four-quad arsenal to fend them off and more than held on with 317.85.
Chan wound up ninth. Not fourth. Not fifth. Not golden. Not vanquished.
A fallen Axel in the short dropped him to 90.01 points, and he simply could not squeeze the slew of five triples that are the bedrock of his program for enough points to catch the quad squad. He landed his quads and most of those triples, and was rewarded justly.
His teammate Keegan Messing capped his “magical” first Olympics with a solid program. He popped one of two planned triple Axels, landed another and doubled a triple loop, so really not bad at all.
“As far as the whole program, I put down a solid performance and I can leave the Olympics happy,” said Messing.
So will Chan. It’s the end of his competitive career, not his ambitions. He’ll probably coach. He already lends his name to a wine business venture. The 27-year-old is ready to move off the ice and on with life, having long ago ceded the leadership of the men’s event to that quad squad. It required a mental shift, the triggering of a defence mechanism in the face of what surely would be criticism over his declining results. He won three consecutive world championships, took two years off and finished fifth in each of his last two trips.
So he has told everyone at every event for the past year that he did not live and die for placements.
The 24 skaters in the long program planned 54 quads, though not all of them were attempted. Chen planned five, but threw in the extra because he needed the points.
Chan didn’t have that option, and he knew it long before he decided to commit to this one last season.
“I went from leaving the sport with Yuzu being the Olympic champion and at the time he had a quad (Salchow) and a quad toe,” Chan had said at Skate Canada in the fall, when he was racked with doubts about his ability even to navigate through the Grand Prix season and nationals and finish off his career at the Olympics. “When I came back a year later we were looking at men doing what they ’re doing now; four or five different quads. It was extremely challenging and I had a lot of ground to make up.”
And he didn’t quite get there again. And so he’s not fourth. Not fifth. Not victorious. Not broken.
And to that we say Hallelujah.