CHEN SOARS TO TITLE
Wins 6th straight U.S. championship with dominant performance in free skate
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Nathan Chen had landed some of the most difficult jumps in figure skating, soaring through the air with a dizzying array of quads and flawlessly stringing together incredible combinations to leave the crowd wanting more.
Figures that he would faceplant on a simple step sequence.
It didn’t matter, though. Nor did a mistake on one of his four quadruple jumps. Chen was that much better than everyone else at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships on Sunday, winning the free skate with 212.63 points and scoring 328.01 in all — good for his sixth consecutive title by nearly 26 points over 17-year-old wunderkind Ilia Malinin.
“Silly things happen all the time. Am I to expect that? Probably not,” Chen said with a smile and shrug. “It was a dumb little moment. I just got wrapped up in that moment and lost my footing. It is what it is. Make sure I don’t do that again.”
Chen’s six titles are the most by a male skater since Todd Eldredge won his sixth in 2002, and he is the first to win six in a row since two-time Olympic champion Dick Button won seven straight in the 1940s and ’50s.
Vincent Zhou followed an exceptional short program with a calamitous free skate Sunday, barely edging Jason Brown for third place. But both wound up making the Olympic team ahead of Malinin when the selection committee chose the experience of Zhou and Brown over the youngster’s soaring ability and bright future.
It has been a remarkable fouryear run for the 22-year-old Chen since a shockingly poor short program at the Pyeongchang Games cost him a shot at an Olympic medal. Chen won 14 consecutive events, from national titles to world championships and everything in between, before losing to Zhou at Skate America in October.
That turned out to be a blip: Chen won Skate Canada the very next week.
He underscored his readiness for Beijing when he broke his own national record in the short program and scored 115.39 points.
Then, Chen put his readiness in all CAPS with his performance in the free skate. Wearing a costume adorned with a supernova, Chen blasted off into another level to music from “Rocketman” with a score that beat his own Grand Prix best this season of 307.18 points.
The selection committee had to pick three skaters for the Olympics that did not finish nationals: Alysa Liu on the women’s team and Alexa Knierim and Brandon Frazier in pairs. Liu and Frazier tested positive for COVID-19 and withdrew.
The remainder of the roster has U.S. champion Mariah Bell and Karen Chen in the women’s competition; gold medalists Ashley Cain-Gribble and Timothy LeDuc in pairs; titlists Madison Chock and Evan Bates, plus Madison Hubbell and Zachary Donohue and Kaitlin Hawayek and JeanLuc Baker in ice dance.