- Joined
- Jun 21, 2003
This was posted by Oatmella in the Nathan Chen fan fest. I thought it was worthy of its own thread in the Edge.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/17/sports/nathan-chen-yale.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/17/sports/nathan-chen-yale.html
Chen zips around campus on a motorized skateboard, potentially sacrificing safety for sleep.
“I can get up at 9:15 and make it to my 9:30 class,” he said
For most of his post-lunch, hourlong practice at Ingalls (the Yale ice arena), Chen had the facility to himself, except for a women’s hockey player who ran up and down the arena steps. He skated over to the boards at regular intervals to manage the music on his phone. Upon finishing, he grabbed a bucket of ice shavings and repaired the divots in the ice that he had created with his toe pick when he pushed off for his jumps.
When Chen finished skating at Ingalls, he changed quickly and hopped into his sport utility vehicle for the 30-minute commute to Champions Skating Center in Cromwell, Conn., for additional practice. He couldn’t dawdle; he had to get his work done and return to campus in time for his 8 p.m. music class. (He has calculus, statistics and psychology in the mornings). For the next hour, Chen reeled off quads while maneuvering around more than a dozen skaters, including a little girl in hot pink skates and a youngster who was practicing her forward to backward transitions. He was struggling with one of his jumps, so he had one of the coaches at the facility take videos, which Chen planned to forward to Arutyunyan to critique.
For Chen, the risk was worth the reward of expanding his mind and his social circle. When he returned to campus after his victory at nationals, Chen’s suite mates greeted him with a box of doughnuts to celebrate. He then gleaned a palatable life lesson: One doughnut won’t bring him down.
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