BEIJING – Nathan Chen remembers making the long drive with his mother from his home in Utah to Rafael Arutyunyan’s training base in Southern California. Chen 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.
A decade later, Chen sat alongside Arutyunyan as his scores were read and that dream was 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 a gold medal Thursday at the Beijing Winter Games. He became the first American figure skating champion at the Olympics 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.”
Arutyunyan would try to give the money back sometimes, Chen said, “but I would always try to stick it in his pocket.”