Chen’s near-perfect skate wins long-sought Olympic gold

Nathan Chen remembers making the long drive with his mother from his home in Utah to Rafael Arutyunyan’s training base in Southern California. He had started out in figure skating just a few years earlier, using his sister’s skates and sleeping in the car to follow his Olympic dreams.

Ten years later, Chen sat alongside Arutyunyan as his scores were read and that dream realized.

With a nearly perfect free skate on the heels of a record-setting short program, the 22-year-old Yale student walked away with the gold medal at the Beijing Games on Thursday. He became the first American figure skating champion since Evan Lysacek in 2010 and capped one of the most dominant four-year runs in the history of the sport.

“My mom and I grew up quite poor. We really didn’t have much money,” Chen said. “She would just scrap together some dollars to try to pay Raf, and Raf obviously knew about the situation and thanks to the kindness of his heart, was able to just continue taking me in, and taking as much money as we could provide him.”