U.S. figure skater Nathan Chen wins Olympic gold, irking Chinese netizens

Nathan Chen clinched the gold medal in the men’s single free skate after delivering a near-perfect performance in the short program early Thursday morning.

Known as the “Quad King” for his ability to consistently perform quadruple jumps, he landed five quad jumps to a medley of Elton John songs scoring a record-setting 113.87 short program, for a total score of 332.60 when combined with his long program.

“I can’t even describe it,” the 22-year-old skater said of his emotions. “You can’t even imagine what it might feel like. It’s just amazing.”

The skater's spectacular win is seen as redemption for his performance at the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, where he ended up skating his way down to a 17th place finish.

Yuma Kagiyama and Shoma Uno of from Japan finished with silver and bronze, respectively, with scores of 310.05 and 293.00.

Chen has credited his victory to his mother, Hetty Wang, who had moved to California with him at the age of 11 to work with renowned coach Rafael Arutyunyan.

“My mom and I grew up quite poor. We really didn’t have much money,” Chen told the Associated Press. “She would just scrap together some dollars to try to pay Raf, and Raf obviously knew about the situation and thanks to the kindness of his heart, was able to just continue taking me in, and taking as much money as we could provide him.”

But the Chinese-American star’s success was received less warmly by Chinese netizens.

A hashtag discussing Chen’s win was the second-highest trending on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social network, reports Bloomberg News. Many comments were negative, with some calling him a “banana,” a derogatory term used to describe Westernized Asians.

Others accused Chen of “insulting China” when he agreed with teammates’ criticism of China’s human rights record, saying the Beijing Olympics were “bringing it to light.”