Tara Lipinski Calls Nathan Chen's Record-Breaking Short Form Performance Her 'Favorite' Olympics Moment So Far
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Nathan Chen made a massive splash at the Winter Olympics when he set the record for the highest score ever in a men's ice skating short program Monday night.
No one was more impressed with the American figure skater's first place score of 113.97 than former Olympic gold medalist Tara Lipinski, who is once again covering the games for NBC. In fact, she explains in a new episode of the PEOPLE Every Day podcast that Chen's routine has been her biggest highlight after nearly a week of events.
"I would say that that probably has been my favorite moment so far," Lipinski tells host Janine Rubenstein, commending his triumphant return after a "disastrous" short program at the 2018 games in PyeongChang. "To see him come back four years later, you can tell this is the only thing that has been on his mind because he's been the most dominant US men's skater of almost all time; he's won every single event he has entered except one in the last four years."
Chen performed a program set to "La Bohème" by Charles Aznavour and executed a series of impressive jumps to move into first place ahead of the second half of the men's individual competition. "I'm elated. Last Olympics, both short programs didn't go the way that I wanted and finally getting the opportunity to see the program to the way that I wanted feels really great, means a lot," Chen told NBC of his performance.
Matthew Stockman/Getty
"He has every title, every color medal twice over, but the one thing he didn't have was an Olympic gold medal," Lipinski points out. "He was able to be so mentally tough and have the skate of his life and set that score. Watching that live... I just had goosebumps."
Lipinski, 39, admits it's those historic moments that actually makes her miss being on the ice. "You see a performance like that... and you're like, oh, I wanna lace up and have that again," she says, although the feeling for her and fellow commentator and former Olympian Johnny Weir is fleeting. "Then you see other skaters struggle and Johnny and I are glad we left. Johnny and I have been in their shoes, or skates if you will, and we know what that feels like."
Outside of the Games themselves, Lipinski has another reason to celebrate this Olympics: her new four-part docuseries Meddling, now airing on streaming platform Peacock. The athlete executive produced the program with her husband Todd Kapostasy, who also served as director.
"For years, we actually said it would be really fun if we could find a way to work together and kind of combine our talents, and that's what we did," she notes about the series, which follows the controversy surrounding Canadian figure skating pair Jamie Salé and David Pelletier losing gold to Russians Anton Sikharulidze and Elena Berezhnaya during the 2002 Winter Olympics in an organized crime scandal.
For Lipinski, the project was a labor of love. "We traveled to Russia and France and Canada all through a pandemic... but we made it happen," she says of the extensive production process, which saw them catching up with all of the incident's major players. "What's exciting about this is people can tune in whether they're a skating fan or an Olympic fan or just like a good old scandal. It changed our sport forever."
Check out more episodes of PEOPLE Every Day, airing on iHeartMedia, Apple podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon Music or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
