TWO QUAD SLIP- UPS DOOM CHEN
HELSINKI High- flying Nathan Chen, the 17- year- old American who has taken the sport of figure skating by storm over the past four months, received an abrupt message Saturday at the world figure skating championships: Not so fast, kid. After landing 20 consecutive quadruple jumps across four major competitions from December through March, Chen crashed to the ice on his first jump — the difficult quad lutz — and fell on a quad salchow in the midst of his 4- minute, 30- second long program. That’s the bad news. Here’s the good news: He still landed four quads.
So, while he failed to win a medal in his world championships debut, finishing a disappointing sixth overall, the promise of being in the mix for an Olympic medal in 10 months at the 2018 Winter Games still shines brightly.
Had he not fallen twice in the long program and once in Thursday’s short program, Chen likely would have won the bronze medal.
“I’m disappointed in what I did today,” he said. “It wasn’t at all the program I wanted to do. I made a whole bunch of mistakes. But it’s a good step for me, it’s a good experience for me. I kind of feel sorry for the things that I did. Whatever happened happened. I just have to put it behind me and move on.”
Chen’s placement, combined with teammate Jason Brown’s seventh- place finish, ensured that the USA will send three men to the Olympics, an accomplishment of some note. ( The sum of the placements of the two had to equal 13, which it did, on the nose.) The U. S. men fielded two skaters at the 2014 Sochi Olympics.
In addition to taking a bit of the wind out of Chen’s sails, the results delivered a second message to the U. S. prodigy, who grew up in Salt Lake City but trains in Southern California:
Bring a second pair of broken- in skate boots to major competitions.
This is a bigger deal than you might think. Last week in practice in Los Angeles, Chen said his boots were causing some trouble, collapsing a bit under the pressure of all that jumping. He changes boots every month or two, and this pair was about 2 weeks old. He stuck with them, tried hockey laces to see if they would help and even added duct tape.
But during the six- minute warm- up for the long program, it all came to a head.
Chen attempted a quad lutz in the practice session and fell. He looked down at his right boot, then went to the boards to talk to his coach, Rafael Arutunian, who gave him a few words of tech- nical advice on the jump. Chen kept practicing, but he wasn’t quite the same.
Ten minutes later, when it was his time to skate, he drove his right toe pick into the ice to propel himself into the air, but he felt the outside of the boot collapse, as he feared, unable to hold up under his weight. Down he went.
Chen had planned a second quad lutz, but as he kept going through the program, his mind racing, he scuttled that and added a different quad, a toe loop, instead — one that would not put so much pressure on the outside of his boot. He landed it.
Chen did have a second pair of boots back in his hotel room, but they were brand- new and not broken in. He said he would make sure that never happened again.
“For sure. I change boots once every one or two months. My previous two pairs were amazing. This pair was just not so hot.”
For the first time in history, three skaters from Asia swept the men’s medals at the world championships. Japan’s Yuzuru Hanyu, the 2014 Olympic champion, won his second world title in four years, followed by countryman Shoma Uno and China’s Boyang Jin.
Chen’s score of 290.72 was nearly 31 points behind Hanyu’s, but less than 13 behind Jin’s.
Brown, who fell on his only quad attempt, was more than 21 points behind Chen.