We all know the drill by now:
Nathan Chen is
a Yale freshman living in New Haven, Connecticut; his coach, Rafael Arutunian, is 3,000 miles away in Southern California. They communicate via text, and when Chen is having trouble with a jump, he dials up Arutunian on FaceTime.
Except sometimes, the coach can diagnose what's wrong, even without video evidence. Is it telepathy? Maybe, but Arutunian would just call it experience.
"Sometimes I can see things, visualize, and he doesn't need to send me anything," says Arutunian. "I already know him so well I can predict which (jump) will basically start to fall apart first. So I try to prevent mistakes, that's what I do."
Chen readily affirms his coach's claim.
"Sometimes he will specify, 'I need a video, show me the video,'" Chen says. "But other times, he knows right away what I'm doing wrong, from what I've done in the past."
It's no mystery, just familiarity rooted in a coach-student relationship that stretches back about eight years, including most of the 19-year-old Chen's formative time as an elite skater. The 61-year-old Arutyunyan, who began his coaching career in the Soviet Union, became Chen's primary coach in 2011 but worked with him on a consulting basis prior to that.
"He knows exactly what my jumps look like, what all of my skating looks like," Chen says. "So if there is something that I know is off and he knows is off, he can tell me very briefly what it is that I've done in the past that correlates to what's happening now."
Arutunian is making the best of the situation, as shown by
Chen's victory at Skate America in Everett, Washington, in October, when he performed a near-perfect free skate, including three quadruple jumps and a triple Axel, to crush the field by more than 40 points – the largest margin in event history. Clearly, though, he thinks the workaround is necessary, but less than ideal.
"Teaching is hard anyway, can you imagine what we deal with?" Arutunian says. "What is good about it is we already have a very long relationship. It's about eight years or more. We understand each other with one word, or half a word. So it helps. But it is still difficult."
It's challenging for Chen, too, although he's fully onboard with the sleep-deprived life of a student-athlete – especially of
one who is still at the top of his game, qualifying for his third consecutive Grand Prix Final, Dec. 6-9.
"Just even handling school, it's a lot of work every night, there is loads and loads of homework you have to finish, which takes away from sleep, and then you come to training the next day (and) can't do anything," Chen says.
"There are definitely times where I am trying to re-prorate my time, so that I'm able to find the time to skate, find the time to study," he adds. "It's the balance. I'm still learning. There will definitely be hard times ahead but also times that will be fun, will be great."
Arutunian is definitely looking ahead, plotting Chen's possible course to the 2022 Beijing Games, when he will still be only 22 years old. He won't divulge his strategy, but it may have something to do with the one-year (two semesters) break Chen has said Yale allows its students during their undergraduate careers.
"I am thinking four years from now," Arutunian says. "It depends on what he will decide to do after one year or two years. And then I have some solutions on how he can get to the Olympics, if he decides to go to the Olympics."
It helps that, over the past few seasons, Chen the skater has become far more than the sum of his quads. Both of his 2018-19 programs – a short choreographed by Shae-Lynn Bourne to Boston Brass' "Caravan," and a free skate created by Marie-France Dubreuil and Samuel Chouinard to Woodkid's "Land of All" – are gaining acclaim for their complexity and deeply textured movements.
"He has become a man and an artist," Arutunian says. "That was because when I was working with him as a child, there were a few programs -- you can go back and see -- every year he was developing himself in step sequence and (choreography) and artistry. That didn't happen suddenly. We were cultivating that."
Arutunian, who also coached Czech Michal Brezina to his first Grand Prix Final this week in seven seasons, will be on the move come this spring. He's slated to move his training base from Lakewood, California, to a new, state-of-the-art facility in nearby Irvine.
"They open in the middle of the season and I can't move in the middle of the season," he says. "It is basically impossible because I have so many students from different countries, and they cannot all move in the middle of the season. I will move April after Worlds, hopefully."
By then, Chen will have his freshman year under his belt. Hopefully, he will have had the time to take part in campus life, or watch some Bulldogs' football. He may even have amassed an impressive GPA, and defended his World title.
"Of course I want to strive towards that perfection, but at the end of the day, it's what I'm capable of doing," Chen says. "Of course I will go for an A, I'm not going to be happy with a B or C or a passing grade, but again it's about balancing my time. At some period of time, I won't be perfect at both school and skating, but I will still be striving to be perfect at both."
And Arutunian, knowing that a skater of Chen's athletic and artistic mettle usually comes along just once or twice in a coach's lifetime, will continue to accommodate his pupil.
"We have what we have," Arutunian says. "We should deal with that, and we are trying to do our best, on both sides -- my side and his side."
Watch Chen fight to defend his Grand Prix Final title live, on-demand and commercial free this weekend with the NBC Sports Gold Figure Skating Pass.
