San Jose, Calif. • It has been eight years since the kid with the bowl cut skated to center ice and bowed in front of a standing ovation. It was that January night eight years ago that a 10-year-old Nathan Chen made the loudest of introductions to the figure skating world, winning the novice category as a preteen, competing to the tune of the classical “Peter and the Wolf.”
It was that same night, when the roars at the 2010 U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Spokane, Wash., had finally died down, that the Salt Lake City skater proclaimed on national television that he estimated the 2018 Olympic Winter Games would likely be the place where he’d make his Olympics debut.