Nathan Chen, Ashley Wagner are two reasons to watch figure skating
HELSINKI — Figure skating used to herald its world championships with blaring trumpets. Today, it’s more like a whisper.
No sport has collapsed in front of our eyes as quickly as this one has. In 1996, when both the women’s and men’s world titles were won by Americans — Michelle Kwan and Todd Eldredge — the men’s long program, shown live on ABC, received a 10.1 rating. It went head to head with the NCAA men’s basketball tournament that day on CBS. March Madness earned an 8.8.
I’ll wait for a moment so you can fully digest that piece of information.
Today, the ratings are minuscule and the skaters are household names only in their own households. It’s understandable in many ways: after the Tonya-Nancy saga, and a 48.5 TV rating at the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics, there was only one way for skating to go, and it wasn’t up.
The sport has come to rest on a comfortable plateau where it retains its position as one of the nation’s most popular Olympic sports. It must live with the memory that it once was so much more: one of the nation’s most popular sports, period.
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If I asked you to name a skater right now, my guess is you’d blurt out Kwan’s name, then shrug when I told you she retired from competition 11 years ago.
Might I offer you two names so you’re ready for the question the next time?
Nathan Chen and Ashley Wagner.
Skating might have lost much of its appeal, but it hasn’t lost its compelling characters. Chen, 17, and Wagner, 25, are two of the most intriguing skaters of this, or any, generation: one for what he can do on the ice, the other for what she means off it.
If you’re going to watch one person in figure skating, it should be Chen. Bright and bold, he is a medal favorite at these world championships and he will be a medal favorite in little more than 10 months at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. He could win the gold both here and there.
Quadruple jumps are the coin of the realm in men’s figure skating, and no one in history has ever landed more quads in a single competition than Chen has, with seven at both the U.S. national championships in January and again at the Four Continents event in February. His current streak is 18 quads in a row.
This is as good a time as any to remember that it was just seven years ago that Evan Lysacek of the United States won the Olympic gold medal in Vancouver with this many quads: zero.
“Skating has evolved quite a lot in the past few years,” Chen said Tuesday after practice. “It’s a cool direction for me and that’s just part of the sport now. … Even when I was younger, I never really saw an end to where we could take jumps. Two years ago, it was kind of the direction I thought I’d have to go so I have strived for it.”
While Chen is fresh and new, Wagner is experienced and wise. News flash: there’s actually a woman in women’s figure skating. Wagner turns 26 in May. When Tara Lipinski was approaching her 26th birthday, she had already been retired from competition for 10 years.
What’s more, Wagner has become a better skater as she has gotten older, which is almost unheard of in women’s skating. The steadiest and most reliable U.S. woman since Kwan, Wagner is the reigning world silver medalist, a three-time U.S. national champion, an Olympic team bronze medalist and the most fearless interviewee the sport has ever known, admirably taking on Vladimir Putin in 2014 and Donald Trump in 2016.
“I may be almost 26, but I have a very young body because I was not very hard on it in the beginning of my career,” she said after her practice. “I’ve been able to maintain that longevity because I’m smart and I pace myself and that has paid off a lot for me. I might be old enough to be some of these kids’ grandmothers in this sport, but I think that I’m a very young 25.”
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