Nathan Chen will not compete at 2026 Milano

With a digital camera trailing his every transfer, Nathan Chen glides across the ice at the same training heart that fueled his Olympic goals. Four years after successful Olympic gold, Chen is still the image of energy and artistry as he picks up velocity to spherical a flip 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 5 clean quadruple jumps to change into the seventh U.S. man to win a determine 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 formally retired, but is prepared to embark on a new profession in medication.

“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 level on his profession with a dominant efficiency in Beijing. He set the world report in the short program. He conquered demons from a 2018 catastrophe in which he completed fifth to win his first particular person Olympic medal. He grew to become the first singles skater in Olympic historical past with two gold medals in the same Games after serving to the United States to a victory in the workforce competitors.

Then Chen slipped seamlessly back into life as a pupil, ending his bachelor’s degree at Yale, where he began before the Games. He started making use of to medical colleges while serving to launch Your True Step, a sequence of skating seminars with Baker, who positioned eleventh in the 2022 Olympic ice dance competitors with associate Kaitlin Hawayek, and choreographer Sam Chouinard. After giving instruction on and off the ice to roughly two dozen younger athletes, the first query Chen obtained Friday during a post-camp Q&A was about which medical faculty he was going to attend.

Whichever one needs him, Chen responded with a chuckle.

Chen, who said taking the medical faculty admission check was even more nerve-racking than competing at the Olympics, is in cardiology or oncology, particularly associated to genetics. He’s curious about cardiothoracic surgical procedure, but nervous about the potential work-life stability sacrifices.

The concern isn’t that Chen is scared to dedicate himself utterly to a specific job. He just needs 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 started in 2024, have introduced Chen and Baker to rinks in Irvine, Boston, Detroit and Seattle. They got here up with the concept while attending a pre-Olympic camp in 2022 so the longtime associates might stay close to each other and to the game. Baker, 31, knew the Beijing Games would seemingly be his last Olympics. Chen wasn’t sure at the time.

Still only 26, Chen could possibly be coming into his bodily prime. The sport has remained open to older opponents as method has progressed. But the window of alternative to realistically win is small, Chen acknowledged, as athletes push the boundaries toward jumps that had been once unimaginable.

Leading up to the 2022 Olympics, Chen dabbled with a quadruple axel during follow, but stopped training it as the Games approached. While he got here close to touchdown it, he was comfy understanding no one else had the daring soar yet.

Only seven months after those Games, Ilia Malinin landed the world’s first quadruple axel in competitors at 17 years previous. Now the favourite for Olympic gold in 2026, the 20-year-old American has received 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 occurred in Boston, where Chen was finishing a post-baccalaureate program. Instead of feeling like he was lacking out, Chen was relieved he didn’t have to really feel the stress of competitors.

He’s content to get pleasure from what could possibly be a golden period of U.S. skating from the sideline. The United States claimed three of 4 world championships in 2025, the most ever for the nation in a single world championship. Alysa Liu made an unbelievable return from a two-year hiatus to change into the first U.S. girl to win the world championship since 2006. Madison Chock and Evan Bates received their third consecutive ice dance world title. Malinin, recognized as “the Quad God,” grew to become the first American man to win back-to-back singles world championships since Chen, who received three.

Chen, the one-time “Quad King,” is glad to go his crown.