Now that the 2022 Olympics Games are in full swing, we’ll be hearing a lot about Team USA’s prized figure skater, Nathan Chen. With his record-breaking scores and his flawless quadruple jumps, it’s likely that he’ll walk away with his first Olympic gold medal. But we’re curious to know: How did his career in figure skating begin?
Keep reading for everything we know.
Nathan Chen, 22, is an American figure skater who currently holds the world record for the highest combined score in men’s skating. Some might recall that he competed for Team USA in 2018, when he scored a bronze medal, but he also boasts three consecutive World titles. In 2017, he made history as the first skater to successfully land five quadruple jumps during one performance. And in 2018, he landed eight quadruple jumps in a single competition. Color us impressed.
Chen was born in 1999 in Salt Lake City, Utah. He was raised by his parents, Zhidong Chen and Hetty Wang, as the youngest of five children.
Per his Team USA page, Chen developed an interest in skating after he watched his brother play hockey. At the time, he was just 3 years old.
Apparently, figure skating isn’t the only thing Chen is passionate about. He enrolled at Yale University in 2018, where he’s currently majoring in Statistics and Data Science. While discussing his decision to balance athletic training with school, he told Yale News, “It was honestly a no-brainer. Yale was a completely different venture for me. I’d never considered that I’d really truly have the opportunity to go, and I didn’t want to pass that up.”
He also said that, for him, college wasn’t that different from the sport. “Skating is extremely good at teaching you how to plan,” he explained. “It is similar to school. You know your test dates, you know when your midterms are, you know when your projects are due, you know how much effort you might have to put in, depending on how difficult the material is.”
From the looks of Chen’s social media pages, it appears that he’s flying solo for now. But in 2017, he was in a relationship with fellow figure skater Amber Glenn. At the time, they were very public about their romance. (See exhibit A above.) But in 2018, they stopped posting about each other on social media, which caused fans to assume that they’d broken up.
If that is the case, we’re pretty sure Chen won’t stay single for long.
