Despite hot start at 2018 U.S. Championships, Salt Lake’s Nathan Chen knows he still must improve

San Jose, Calif. • Nathan Chen skated off the ice, his head down, knowing even a dominant night could’ve been much, much better. That’s who he is. The 18-year-old phenom won the men’s short program Thursday evening at the 2018 U.S. Figure Skating Championships.

That is not a surprise.

Neither is the work-in-progress routine that Chen, the reigning U.S. champion and likely Olympic medal contender, knows must be better if he wants to stand atop a podium in Pyeongchang, South Korea, in a month’s time.

He’s set a bar so high for himself that there is still room — and a few more weeks — to get there.

Chen left the ice not at all disheartened or deterred. He smiled, as he usually does. The crowd, which gave him a deserved standing ovation after his first skate, pelted the rink with stuffed toys. The first to hit the ice was a plush red rose. Then a giant penguin, followed by a piece of pizza and a large green turtle.

“I definitely felt the energy — it’s different from last year,” Chen said. “Ultimately, I have to do what I set out to do and set my own goals.”

What’s clear, even after completing a program performance that looked so certain from the outset, is that Chen can — and against the world’s top dogs — can fine-tune even the most minor of mishaps. He may be the quad king, spinning faster and jumping higher and more often than any other skater, but a slight step out on his triple axel landing was Chen’s one flaw Thursday night at the SAP Center in downtown San Jose.

Reports from Chen’s training session Wednesday indicated that he wasn’t entirely himself. He fell to the ice not once or twice, but four times. In a jump in his warmup group Thursday, Chen even took a slight spill, forcing a gasp from the sparse crowd in attendance.

Did he fix things?

“Definitely,” Chen said. “My mind was not in the right place yesterday. Having a day to just recover and just recalculate definitely helped a lot.”

Skating to “Nemsis,” by Benjamin Clementine, Chen easily stuck his two quad attempts. He will, once again, showcase a five-quad spectacular in Saturday’s free skate. In the lead-up to these U.S. championships, Chen made it clear that defending his first U.S. crown would be a bonus, but it is not the end goal.

This week would be tossed into the rest of the 2017-2018 campaign, in which he went undefeated in the fall Grand Prix. No matter the points gap, Chen’s laundry list of wins in the last year makes him a basic shoo-in.

A committee chooses the U.S. men’s and women’s Olympic teams based on criteria centered around results from competitions within the last calendar year.

“I just try to make sure that I’m in my zone every competition,” Chen said. “I’ll always get nervous, regardless of how big or small the competition is.”

Chen said he decided to change up the second of his quad attempts Thursday. It was a move based around percentages, choosing a landing in the quad toe that is somewhat more guaranteed. Chen has been battling an illness for two weeks that’s lingered since returning from Japan. Feeling the effects have hampered him from training the way he usually does. It’s been a challenge just to get through basic practices, he said.

It didn’t show Thursday, in what Chen called a “watered-down program.”

Which, again, is not that much of a surprise.