page_title: Nathan Chen
section_title: 2016–2017 season: Senior international debut
hierarchical_section_title: Nathan Chen / Skating career / 2016–2017 season: Senior international debut
caption_attribution_description: English: Nathan Chen at 2017 US Nationals
context_page_description: Nathan Chen is an American figure skater who competes in the men's singles discipline. He is a two-time World champion, a 2018 Winter Olympic bronze medalist in the team event, the 2017 Four Continents champion, three-time Grand Prix Final champion, and four-time U.S. national champion. Chen is the first skater to have landed five types of quadruple jumps in competitions: toe loop, Salchow, loop, flip and Lutz.
  On the junior level, Chen is the 2015–16 Junior Grand Prix Final champion, 2013–14 Junior Grand Prix Final bronze medalist, and 2014 World Junior bronze medalist.
context_section_description: Ahead of the 2016–2017 season, Chen traveled to Canton, Michigan, to have his programs choreographed by Marina Zueva. "I spent a week there, and we hit it off really well. We talked it over and thought it'd be a good idea to go to Michigan and work on PCS a little bit." By September 2016, six months after his hip surgery, Zueva and Oleg Epstein were coaching him in Canton. In preparation for his international senior debut, he started to train the 4Lz and 4F.
  Armed with four different types of quads — 4T, 4S, 4F, and 4Lz — Chen began his season with a gold medal at the 2016 CS Finlandia Trophy, 7.71 points ahead of silver medalist Patrick Chan of Canada. He then competed at two Grand Prix events. For his Grand Prix series debut at the 2016 Trophée de France in Paris, Chen cleanly landed a 4Lz+3T combination jump and a 4F jump in both his short and long programs. His short program scored 92.85, breaking the American short program record of 90.30 held by Olympic champion Evan Lysacek since the 2010 Winter Olympics. After finishing fourth in France, he returned to Arutyunyan in California. At the 2016 NHK Trophy in Sapporo, Chen placed second behind the reigning Olympic champion Yuzuru Hanyu and thus qualified for the Grand Prix Final (GPF) in Marseille, France.
  In December at the GPF, Chen placed 5th in the short program but won the free skate with a performance that included four quadruple jumps. Having obtained a total score of 282.85 points, he was awarded the silver medal behind Yuzuru Hanyu and became the second-youngest male skater (age 17) to medal at the GPF after Evgeni Plushenko, who won his first GPF medal at age 16 in 1999. He spent two weeks later that month working in Canton, Michigan, modifying the element order and choreography of his programs.
  At the 2017 U.S. Championships in Kansas City, Missouri, Chen performed two quadruple jumps (4Lz+3T and 4F) in the short program and five in the free skate (4Lz+3T, 4F, 4T+2T+2Lo, 4T and 4S), the first person to ever do so. He won the U.S. title with the highest scores in U.S. Figure Skating history (106.39 in the short program, 212.08 in the free skate, 318.47 overall). Following the event, he and teammate Jason Brown were named to the 2017 World team by U.S. Figure Skating.
  In February, Chen won the short program at the 2017 Four Continents and subsequently, the competition, becoming the third person to score over 100 points in a short program and over 300 points in an International Skating Union competition.
  In April, at the World Championships in Helsinki, the boots that he had begun using after Four Continents were on the verge of falling apart; however, he decided to continue using them, using duct tape and hockey laces, because he felt that the back-up boots were too new. He attempted a record total of eight quadruple jumps, two in the short program and six in the long program, but fell on two quadruple jumps in his long program and placed sixth overall at the competition. He and teammate Jason Brown, who placed seventh, secured three berths for the United States in the men's event at the 2018 Winter Olympics.
  Chen rounded off the season with a 3rd place team and 2nd place personal finish at the 2017 World Team Trophy in Tokyo.
caption: Chen at the 2017 U.S. Championships
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