Nathan Chen hopped on a plane to Italy. This week, he’ll be in the Milano Ice Skating Arena, analyzing every move of the men’s Olympic figure skating field. Yet he’ll have an unusual vantage point for these Winter Games.
This time, he‘ll be watching from the stands.
“Now,” said Chen, “I get to see what it looks like on the other side.”
Chen never officially retired, but he hasn’t competed since 2022, when he became the only male singles skater to win two gold medals in a single Olympics. His main role in Italy will be schmoozing with sponsors and offering Utah 2034 donors commentary on the men’s skating competition.
Even if he isn’t gliding over the ice, though, the marks of Chen’s skating will be visible in Milan’s arena and many others. His innovative style has set the stage for skaters who have adopted his daring moves — from quadruple jumps to backflips — as they push the envelope of what humans can do and what judges will accept.
“Without Nathan, we would not be seeing multiple quads in a performance all the time,” said 1998 gold medalist Tara Lipinski, who is leading NBC’s figure skating commentary alongside two-time Olympian Johnny Weir. “Nathan really revolutionized men’s skating, and Ilia [Malinin] is redefining that in a different way, in a more evolved way, as we step up that ladder.
“But Nathan is the one that set that path forward.”
The jumps are the obvious launching point for a discussion on Chen’s influence on the sport. Chen was bestowed with the nickname “The Quad King” for his prolific use of the four-spin jumps. Now Malinin, whose Instagram handle is #QuadG0d, is Team USA’s gold-medal favorite.
Chen wasn’t the first to throw down a quad, or several, in competition. Two Canadians blazed the trail there in the 1980s and ’90s. At the time, they were considered more of a parlor trick than a pantry staple.
Then, the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City became a fulcrum in the sport. After a vote-trading judging scandal rocked Utah’s first Winter Games, scoring became more metrics-based, elevating the quad’s value. That was also the year that, after watching his sisters participate in the Opening Ceremony, a 3-year-old Chen begged his mom to give him skating lessons.
Fast forward 16 years to the epic quad throwdown between Chen and Japan’s Yuzuru Hanyu in the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea. Hanyu had fewer but more refined quads than Chen and landed them to take the early lead. After a disastrous short program in which he finished 17th, Chen elevated the technical difficulty of his long program. He attempted six quads, landing five of them, to leap into fifth in the final standings.
In 2022, Chen’s elegant proficiency at five types of quad jumps forced his competition to keep pace. When he performed both programs cleanly, he proved invincible.
Now, Malinin has sprinkled such a variety of quads throughout his programs that — like Chen — as long as he hits them, his base technical score makes him nearly impossible to beat. Betting odds give him between a 90% and 99% chance of winning the gold Friday.
“He’s definitely inspired me so much,“ Malinin said of Chen, whom he trained with in the run-up to the 2022 Olympics.
“Just seeing how hard he worked and everything he put in, it was an inspiration for me to put that same amount of work into it.”
Weir said Chen’s impact on the sport went beyond individual skaters.
“You can certainly see a huge influence across especially men’s skating from Nathan Chen,” Weir said. “Whether it’s the way he dressed or the way he skated and the new boundaries he was able to break technically — including so many quadruple jumps.”
Chen says he can’t take complete credit for that evolution. He nods to Japan’s Hanyu and Shoma Uno and his Team USA peer Vincent Zhou as being among those who accelerated the quality and quantity of quads.
“My generation certainly left an impact,” Chen said. He added, “We were pushing quads like crazy.”
And don’t forget backflips.
During Saturday’s team competition, Malinin became the first skater to be rewarded for performing a backflip at an Olympics. Chen helped set the table for the flip’s comeback.
American Terry Kubicka landed the first backflip in competition at the 1976 Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria. Judges viewed it as gauche, though, and the federation promptly banned it. Two decades later, when France’s Surya Bonaly performed one in the women’s competition at the 1998 Nagano Olympics, it was interpreted as an act of defiance.
Yet when Chen performed one during the Exhibition Gala at the conclusion of the 2022 Winter Games, it thrilled viewers and NBC’s commentators. French skater Adam Siao Him Fa further solidified the move’s popularity when he performed it in the European and World Championships in 2024. Ultimately, the skating federation reversed its ban during the 2024-25 season, calling the feat “very spectacular.”
“It’s honestly just such an incredible, raw feeling in this environment,” Malinin told reporters in Milan after his short-program skate. “Once I do that backflip, everyone’s, like, screaming for joy and they’re just out of control.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAiGGZAfIIw
As Malinin and Japan’s Shun Sato and the rest of the next generation push their technical scores ever higher, one question lingers: Will they usher in the quintuple jump era?
“That,” Chen said, “is the million dollar question.”
He said the answer will depend on the International Skating Union, and what it wants to emphasize. Under the current rules, Chen said, a quint would produce enough value to encourage skaters to attempt it. If the federation adjusts its rules to put more emphasis on the artistic side of the sport, which it is rumored to be considering, that might stall the quint’s arrival.
But even if it pays to quint, is it physically possible? Chen doesn’t know.
“There’s a human limit. I don’t know what that is,” he said. “But we also didn’t think a quad axel was possible.”
What he does know is that he is not working on one. He hardly has the time.
Chen graduated from Yale University with a degree in statistics and data in 2024 and has since been busy preparing his applications for medical school. Plus, he has joined with former U.S. ice dancer Jean-Luc Baker and choreographer Sam Chouinard to start Your True Step, a skating clinic for kids.
Chen is also part of the Utah 2034 steering committee. The 35-member panel is charged with advising the tenor and direction of Salt Lake City’s next Winter Games. Though he’s not been very active so far — other than serving as an ambassador this week in Milan — Chen said he would like to be involved with developing outreach programs to get kids involved with the Olympics.
“The Games represent this idea,” Chen said, “that they are sort of the next inspiration for the next generation.”
So set aside the quad jumps and backflips. Olympians may be tracing the marks of Chen’s legacy for decades to come.
