With a camera trailing his every move, Nathan Chen glides across the ice at the same training center that fueled his Olympic dreams. Four years after winning Olympic gold, Chen is still the picture of power and artistry as he picks up speed to round a turn and circles an arm around his head.
“Is this a comeback?” Jean-Luc Baker, a 2022 Olympic ice dancer, playfully asks.
The reigning Olympic champion has not skated competitively since Feb. 10, 2022, when Chen landed five clean quadruple jumps to become the seventh U.S. man to win a figure skating singles gold medal.
He doesn’t intend to change that soon.
Six months before the Milano Cortina Olympics, Chen confirmed he will not defend his Olympic title. The two-time Olympic gold medalist hasn’t officially retired, but is ready to embark on a new career in medicine.
“I just want to open doors to kind of see what’s the best sort of approach for me,” Chen told The Times. “And frankly, at this point in time in my life, I’ve already accomplished enough in skating that I’m quite satisfied with my career.”
A six-time national champion and three-time world champion, Chen put an exclamation point on his career with a dominant performance in Beijing. He set the world record in the short program. He conquered demons from a 2018 disaster in which he finished fifth to win his first individual Olympic medal. He became the first singles skater in Olympic history with two gold medals in the same Games after helping the United States to a victory in the team competition.
Then Chen slipped seamlessly back into life as a student, finishing his bachelor’s degree at Yale, where he started before the Games. He began applying to medical schools while helping launch Your True Step, a series of skating seminars with Baker, who placed 11th in the 2022 Olympic ice dance competition with partner Kaitlin Hawayek, and choreographer Sam Chouinard. After giving instruction on and off the ice to roughly two dozen young athletes, the first question Chen received Friday during a post-camp Q&A was about which medical school he was going to attend.
Whichever one wants him, Chen responded with a chuckle.
Chen, who said taking the medical college admission test was even more nerve-wracking than competing at the Olympics, is interested in cardiology or oncology, specifically related to genetics. He’s curious about cardiothoracic surgery, but worried about the potential work-life balance sacrifices.
The concern isn’t that Chen is scared to dedicate himself completely to a particular job. He just wants his next project to be as fulfilling as skating was.
“The basis of being a doctor, I think, is to help people,” Chen said. “I think that’s something that I didn’t necessarily feel as an athlete, that I felt was a little bit lacking, and I get a little bit of that sense doing YTS.”
The skating camps, which began in 2024, have brought Chen and Baker to rinks in Irvine, Boston, Detroit and Seattle. They came up with the idea while attending a pre-Olympic camp in 2022 so the longtime friends could remain close to each other and to the sport. Baker, 31, knew the Beijing Games would likely be his last Olympics. Chen wasn’t sure at the time.
Nathan Chen listens to the national anthem while standing on the top step of the podium after winning gold in men’s figure skating at the 2022 Beijing Olympic Games.
(Jae C. Hong / Associated Press)
Still only 26, Chen could be entering his physical prime. The sport has remained open to older competitors as technique has progressed. But the window of opportunity to realistically win is small, Chen acknowledged, as athletes push the limits toward jumps that were once unimaginable.
Leading up to the 2022 Olympics, Chen dabbled with a quadruple axel during practice, but stopped training it as the Games approached. While he came close to landing it, he was comfortable knowing no one else had the daring jump yet.
Only seven months after those Games, Ilia Malinin landed the world’s first quadruple axel in competition at 17 years old. Now the favorite for Olympic gold in 2026, the 20-year-old American has won consecutive world championships.
While Malinin, who also trains at Irvine’s Great Park Ice with Chen’s former coach Rafael Arutyunyan, landed six quadruple jumps at the 2025 world championships, Chen watched from afar.
The event took place in Boston, where Chen was completing a post-baccalaureate program. Instead of feeling like he was missing out, Chen was relieved he didn’t have to feel the stress of competition.
He’s content to enjoy what could be a golden era of U.S. skating from the sideline. The United States claimed three of four world championships in 2025, the most ever for the country in a single world championship. Alysa Liu made an improbable return from a two-year hiatus to become the first U.S. woman to win the world championship since 2006. Madison Chock and Evan Bates won their third consecutive ice dance world title. Malinin, known as “the Quad God,” became the first American man to win back-to-back singles world championships since Chen, who won three.
Chen, the one-time “Quad King,” is happy to pass his crown.
