By Maura Sullivan Hill, Team FSO contributing writer
Photos courtesy of Karen Chen
Editor’s Note: This is the fifth in a series of articles on skaters who are competing in U.S. Figure Skating’s Collegiate/Intercollegiate Skating.
When Karen Chen takes the ice to compete for the Cornell University Figure Skating Club this season, she’ll make history with her presence. Chen will be the first U.S. Olympic Champion to compete at the collegiate level.
But to hear her tell it, she’s just another member of the team.
“I knew people that I met during my freshman year that were in the club, and I knew that the club was growing, so I just naturally wanted to be involved,” Chen said in an interview via Zoom. “It just naturally became something that I wanted to do, since I love skating so much. I wanted to help grow the club. And I’m really thankful to be co-president and co-captain of the club, to be able to do my best and bring some wisdom to the club.”
She’s serving as co-president of the club for the second year in a row, and competes in the solo ice dance event. Last season, when the team needed some extra points to clinch a spot at Collegiate Nationals, Chen even skated in an extra pattern dance event at a teammate’s request. There’s no ego in her participation.
She joined the club when she returned for her sophomore year on campus in the fall of 2022. Chen attended Cornell as a freshman during the 2019-2020 academic year, and then took some time off to focus on her training for the 2022 Olympics in Beijing, where she won gold alongside her teammates in the Figure Skating Team event.
Her fellow skaters at Cornell were excited to have an Olympian among their ranks, Chen shared, but said her presence was also a little intimidating at first.
“As a person who’s naturally introverted, I had to really try to be extroverted and talk to everyone and make sure that everyone feels welcome,” Chen said. “Because at the end of the day, that’s what the club is all about. We’re very welcoming. If you’re interested in skating or have even just taken a PE [ice skating] class at Cornell, you can join the club.”
For any collegiate athletes worried about the prospect of competing against an Olympian, Chen isn’t skating in the women’s singles event anymore. She’s traded her triple jumps for twizzles, and enjoys the opportunity to express herself in solo dance.
“Solo dance is just much more flexible. I’m not really worried about if the judges like my music or if my coach likes it,” Chen said. “Similar to what I would do for shows, I just pick music that I like and then go from there. So it gives me a chance to be creative.”
Last season, she skated to songs by pop singer Billie Eilish, and this year she’s skating to the soundtrack from the movie “The Theory of Everything.”
Her brother, Jeffrey Chen, is a senior ice dancer for Team USA, and she joked that he doesn’t have too much extra time to offer her dance tips, but he will help with twizzles when she asks.
Chen and her teammates in the Cornell Figure Skating Club practice on Mondays and Wednesdays at Lynah Rink, the hockey arena on campus. But school is her main focus over ice time these days, she says.
Her major is human development and she’s applying to physical therapy schools, with an eye on potentially working with skaters as a PT in the future. She’ll graduate from Cornell in the spring of 2025.
Until then, she’ll be balancing her studies with time on the ice at Lynah Rink. Besides competing in the U.S. Collegiate Series and aiming to help the team qualify for the Collegiate Final, she’s also looking forward to the club’s annual ice show. They had more than 700 in the crowd at last year’s show, and Chen’s goal is to fill the arena like a hockey game for this year’s event. It’s safe to say that seeing an Olympic Champion perform will definitely draw a crowd.
Chen received her Olympic Gold Medal this summer, in a ceremony at the 2024 Paris Olympics, after a long delay in awarding the medals, due to the doping case against Russian figure skater Kamilia Valieva. The U.S. team found out they’d finally be getting their medals just a week before the August 7 ceremony in Paris. Chen’s parents and brother were able to travel to the celebration.
“It was honestly one of the most amazing experiences ever. Leading up to that point, we were told we have so many appeals going on, we don’t know. There was some talk of having it postponed to Milan [host of the 2026 Winter Olympics], because we just didn’t know if all the things going on behind closed doors would be finished in time. So all of us were just a bit like, okay, it might not happen,” Chen said. “So to be able to go from that to, we’re booking flights, it was just a crazy thing. For me, the biggest thing, I felt very grateful and thankful to have that moment with my team, but also to have my family there. That was a positive thing, because if it happened in Beijing, family wouldn’t have been there to experience that moment with us.”
After the highs of the Olympics, one could question why Chen wants to keep competing on the collegiate stage. But she says she needs that time on the ice for her mental health.
“When I was competing full time, I feel like skating was the cause of my mental health stuff going on, since I was under a lot of pressure and stress. But now that pressure and stress has shifted to school instead, and skating has become something to help me cope with that,” she said. “I’ll be sitting in lectures [thinking], ‘I don’t really know what’s going on, this is really hard.’ But then I know when I put my skates on and I’m on the ice, I know what I’m doing and I feel confident.”
Chen is among a number of elite Team USA skaters who have gone on to compete at the collegiate level. Catch up with them all here in our series about U.S. Collegiate Skating:
Medals and Med School: Joonsoo Kim
Wren Warne-Jacobsen’s Art of Balance
Former Team USA pairs skater Audrey Lu embraces collegiate skating
