Yuzuru Hanyu: Can Japan’s figure skating star beat Nathan Chen to Beijing Olympics gold? Will quad axel help?

Nathan Chen set a new short programme world record to blow apart the competition in the men’s singles – but it was a blunder from his biggest rival Yuzuru Hanyu that sparked the biggest gasps. Japan star Hanyu, the champion from Sochi 2014 and PyeongChang 2018, blew his first jump – rotating just once when he was meant to attempt a quadruple salchow. Although he recovered to deliver the rest of his performance with his famed grace and poise, he sits eighth at the halfway stage.

Ad/> Chen’s record 113.97 score leaves him the overwhelming favourite for a first Olympic title, with Japanese duo Yuma Kagiyama (108.12) and Shoma Uno (105.90) the only other athletes to crack the 100-point barrier. Beijing 2022Hanyu ‘shocked’, Chen ‘elated’ following dramatic short programme6 HOURS AGO Hanyu is safely through to Thursday’s free skate but faces mission impossible to overhaul Chen. He sits on 95.15, meaning he must overturn a whopping 18.82-point deficit for gold and claw back 10.75 points just to make the podium.

It leaves us all asking the same question: can it be done? CAN QUAD AXEL SAVE YUZURU HANYU’S DREAM? The build-up to the figure skating at the Beijing Olympics was dominated by talk of one move: the quadruple axel. Never landed successfully in competition, Hanyu has already spoken of his desire to become the first skater to do so. Now with his back against the wall, he will have no choice but to go for an ultra-aggressive routine headlined by his not-so-secret weapon.

Figure skating scoring is extraordinarily complex and we’ve tried our best to break it down here. Basically each jump is awarded a base value – the riskier the move, the more points on offer. The problem with the quadruple axel, while sounding mystically