CHEN GRABS 6TH IN A ROW
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 at Nashville, Tenn., 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-yearold 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 men’s skater since Todd Eldredge won his sixth in 2002, and he is the first to win six in a row since twotime 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.
“That’s definitely my dream, to go to the Olympics,” Malinin said, “and definitely I think I deserve to go, especially with everything I’ve gone through. This has really changed my life.”
Chen won 14 consecutive events, from national titles to world championships and everything in between, before losing to Zhou at Skate America in October.
Other skaters set
Newly crowned U.S. ice dance champions Madison Chock of Redondo Beach and Evan Bates were nominated to the U.S. Olympic team. The Beijing Games will be their third Olympic appearance as a couple and the fourth for Bates, who competed at the 2010 Games with a different partner. He will become the first four-time figure skating Olympian.
Madison Hubbell and
Zach Donohue, who placed fourth at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games and were the runners-up at this year’s national championships, also were nominated to the Beijing team. The third ice dance nomination went to Kaitlin Hawayek and JeanLuc Baker, who will be firsttime Olympians.
Also, pair champions Ashley Cain-Gribble and Timothy LeDuc and 2021 champions Alexa Knierim and
Brandon Frazier were nominated to the two allotted U.S. pair berths.