And if there’s one place even a world famous athlete can be relatively unnoticed, it’s here. “I can walk around,” he said. “There’s a woman who just won an Oscar in my [residential] college,” he said, referring to Sophie Ascheim, who won in the short documentary category.
Over the next couple of years, Chen will be building toward the Beijing Olympics in 2022 — an epic showdown with Hanyu is already anticipated. Chen said he will consider taking a year off from school for the Olympics, but he remains committed to learning about the world, about himself.
“Skating definitely has its moments,” he said, “where you end up getting in a rut that’s hard to get out of, where every single day, that’s all you think about, all you’re doing. It definitely takes a lot out of you. Ultimately, athletes who are elite enough know how to get out of that and keep plugging away at it, but it doesn’t allow you to really enjoy the sport as much as we should. So having an option to just take a step back away from skating each day and focus on something else allows me to compress every day and be able to set new objectives, utilize what I’ve learned in the past, give myself a break. … I’m challenging myself, evolving, learning, getting better as a person.”
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