Wearing a confident smirk, Chen avenged his poor short program from four years ago at the Pyeongchang Games in the biggest way possible.
He opened with a perfect quad flip, breezed through his often-vexing triple axel, then drilled his quad flip-triple toe loop combination before skating to a stop and delivering a right haymaker at the air.
As for their longtime idol, Hanyu bailed out of his planned opening quad salchow and received no points for the jump, a massive mistake that cost the two-time defending Olympic champion a shot at a third gold medal. Hanyu finished in eighth place with 95.15 points, a deficit so great that not even his planned quad axel in the free skate can make it up.
The short program he nailed in Beijing, with a base value of 36.27 points, was the hardest ever tried in competition.Chen's ferociously steady build toward his second Olympics, a stretch that included three world titles and the most recent of his six national championships, contrasted starkly with the bumpy, injury-filled path that Hanyu took to Beijing.
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