The 2026 Winter Olympics will not be featuring Nathan Chen.
The reigning men’s figure skating gold medalist told the Los Angeles Times he will not return to competition for the Games next year, instead opting to pursue a career in medicine. The 26-year-old graduated from Yale last year and is in the process of applying to medical school.
From the Times:
“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.”
Chen has been one of the biggest names in figure skating over the past decade, winning two Olympic gold medals plus a bronze, three world championships and six national titles. He still holds the world record for a combined score with a 335.30 total at the 2019 Grand Prix Final.
His career reached its apex in the Beijing Games in 2022, when he recovered from a massively disappointing fifth-place finish in 2018 to bring home the gold with a performance that included a world record in the short program and his signature quads in the free skate. He also helped lead Team USA to gold in the team competition, which was upgraded from silver due to the disqualification of the Russian team.
Nicknamed the “Quad King,” Chen hasn’t appeared in a figure skating competition since those Olympics. Instead, he has focused on his studies at Yale and launched Your True Step, a series of skating seminars with ice dancer Jean-Luc Baker and choreographer Sam Chouinard.
He told the Times that taking the MCAT was more nerve-racking than competing in the Olympics and that he is interested in cardiology or oncology as a specialty, with cardiothoracic surgery a particular curiosity. From the Times:
“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.”
While the absence of Chen removes a major gold-medal contender from the field, Team USA still figures to have the favorite in the men’s competition. Ilia Malinin, 20, has already done something Chen never did, landing the fabled quad axel, and has won the last two world championships, the latter in dominant fashion with six quad jumps.
The 2025 world championships also saw the U.S. win the women’s competition, thanks to Alysa Liu’s incredible comeback, and the ice dancing, closely won by Madison Chock and Evan Bates for their third straight title.
