Chan saves the last smile for himself
PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA— Patrick Chan said he was happy. Canada’s greatest ever men’s figure skater had just left the ice for the final time as a competitor; had just watched the last of his scores come up and heard the crowd give a little gasp of disappointment. He said, “Wow.” And Patrick Chan’s career was over.
He smiled through it, as he has tried to smile through everything. Patrick Chan is a three-time world champion, a 10time national champion, and one of the pieces of the sport’s continued evolution. A marvellous career.
And he retires without a gold medal in the men’s event at the Olympics. It is a legacy or an asterisk, but either way a part of the whole thing. He was great, but.
“I told him, fight for making your memory,” said his girlfriend, former skater and coach, Liz Putnam. “Because you’re in charge of creating that. Fight for that. The points and the medals are so far out of your hands, and it’s a cliché thing to say, and it’s the thing you say when you’re not fighting for a medal. But he’s truly at the end of such a beautiful, vibrant career.”
He is. When Chan stepped out on the ice for the last time, sitting sixth after a short program that featured a fall on a troublesome triple Axel, he knew he couldn’t win a medal, not with those scores up there. He took a breath and told himself, this is for me.
And then it fell apart, a little. He didn’t go out letting everything fly. It probably wasn’t what he wanted. He was sixth after the short program, and he finished ninth. He tried not to let that be what defined this experience, this ending. Chan has talked a lot about how the Olympics don’t define him. This was for him, not for us.
“That’s quite a command, if you can have so many eyes on you, and TV and everything, and so much exposure, and to be able to be — you know what? — I’m going to silence all of that and just (say) this is for me and I’m going to enjoy every second of it,” Chan said. “I deserve to be here. I worked hard to earn this four minutes and 40 seconds of skate time. I was just so proud that I was able to do that. I definitely wasn’t able to do that in the last two Games.”
Maybe it’s right that in a country whose male skaters win everything but Olympic gold, Chan was the greatest of them, and therefore the greatest disappointment, too. Sochi was supposed to be the moment, but he stumbled. Joannie Rochette was doing analysis for the CBC, and her tweet is still up: “Il avait l’or sur un plateau d’argent. Il a pris le plateau.” —“He had gold on a silver platter. He took the platter.”
That was the moment, and this is the end. The multiple quad movement, which Chan could hang with once, has multiplied even more — American Nathan Chen, 18, attempted six Saturday. Sports evolve, for good or bad, but they leave people behind.
“It’s funny: it’s just timing,” Putnam said. “Had he won in 2014 he probably would have retired. And maybe that brought him back and gave us another four years of Patrick Chan. So I don’t know: now at the tender age of 27 he’s one of the old farts out there, and the timing wasn’t . . . when he was in his prime, and leading the field technically, it didn’t happen. And now when he’s lagging technically and still leading the field skating-wise, it’s still not there. It wasn’t his time to win a medal.”
Patrick Chan was great. Eric Radford, who won bronze in the pairs with Meagan Duhamel and was part of the team gold with Chan, says Chan is the greatest pure skater in figure skating history: his edges, the way he could lean and cross over. Radford said, “The other skaters, when we watch him, we are all in silence, thinking, I wish I could skate like that.”
But Chan had his chance and then the sport left him behind, and in the end Chan almost seemed to have distanced himself, as if to get out in one healthy piece.
He talked about how aliens would find it all so strange: the costumes, asking judges for praise. He said the sport taught him “how to be more emotional with myself, more mature, more understanding with my thoughts.”
“I just look forward to not having to expose myself out on the ice in front of judges,” he said, saying he would compete in shows, rather than competitions. “And ( just) shake it.”
He will move to Vancouver, hopes to open a skating academy and get his commercial real estate licence. He said, “I’m so proud that I was able to stick in it this long. I’m happy that I can leave these Games with a gold medal in the team event. Now I’m looking for gold medals in other things in my life. I look forward to that.
“I hope that people will one day look back at my skating and what I brought to the table. ‘Remember when Patrick skated like this? Or remember when skating was like this?’ That would be a cool legacy to leave behind.” People will say that. They will say, “remember when Patrick Chan skated like this?” And it will mean different things to different people, depending on what you remember. But Patrick Chan, after all the glories and the heartbreak defeats, says he’s happy. I hope he is.