He can see the finish line and knows exactly how he wants to glide across it — head held high with a smile on his face.
Sounds easy enough for someone whose résumé includes Canadian titles at every level, including two as a senior, and a World Junior crown in 2014.
Nam Nguyen has enjoyed his moments of triumph, to be sure. But the 23-year-old’s journey has also been a rollercoaster at times, with those title-winning highs also accompanied by some occasions where the sport — and the circumstances around it — has laid him low. Perhaps none lower than those he has been battling for the past year or so.
In a backstage interview at Skate America last October Nguyen announced this would be his final season. When asked the reason two months later, he produced a quick response. “COVID. It really destroyed my motivation to skate.”
Before the global pandemic took hold in early 2020, Nguyen felt he was in a good place. He had won a surprising — and extremely satisfying — second Canadian title in 2019 and rode that momentum into the following season. He produced a silver-medal finish at Skate Canada International in the fall of 2019 and placed second at the 2020 Canadian Championships. After a sixth-place result at the Four Continents Championships, Skate Canada chose Nguyen to be their lone entry in the men’s event at the 2020 World Championships on home soil in Montréal.
Mentally and physically, Nguyen was right where he wanted to be, but when the pandemic wiped out those World Championships, things began spiraling downward.
“For me, the whole stopping and starting last season was really, really frustrating. We were preparing for Skate Canada last season, which was supposed to be in Ottawa, and I honestly was in really good shape and ready to go. I was almost at the same level of preparation as I was going into Montréal Worlds,” Nguyen recalled. “Then we got the word that it was cancelled, and I was just completely destroyed mentally. Now, people are going to say I sound really dramatic — and in a certain sense that is true because skating has been my whole life.
“But when you get stopped because of a global pandemic and have to work yourself back up again, and then you hit a level where you are finally comfortable and they keep telling you ‘Oh, that event is not happening’ and it happens over and over, then it’s like … come on, what is going on? By the time World Team Trophy came around, I was over it. I was like I can’t do this; this is really frustrating.”
What seemed like the lowest of lows got worse a few weeks later when Nguyen resumed training and suffered the first of a series of injuries that kept him off the ice for a number of months. He withdrew from all his planned summer events and began to wonder whether it was worth it to continue.
“From there, it was a huge battle mentally and physically to put myself in the position of wanting to come into the rink,” Nguyen recalled. “That’s when I thought, in the summer, that ‘I hate this and I want to quit.’ There were a lot of tears being shed behind the scenes. Then my team was like, let’s try to push through this season and see where we are.
“So we’ve been doing that — I have been showing up at events and stuff — but this whole time there has been an underlying tone of this will be my last season. I don’t want to ruin my mental health. It’s already kind of destroyed and I’m already seeing a mental health coach to help me stay sane. So that’s the reason why this is my last season.”
It has not been the most memorable of final seasons so far. Nguyen withdrew from Autumn Classic International, a Challenger Series event, and his two Grand Prix competitions, Skate America and NHK Trophy, produced middling results.
After an appearance at the 2022 Skate Canada Challenge in early December did not go well, Nguyen decided it was time for a change in mindset. That has given him renewed motivation for the rest of his farewell season.
“Before that, it was about monitoring my competitors for the Olympics and all that stuff. That was destroying me, seeing how well they were doing, and I was getting pressured about it,” he explained. “So then it was, you know what, screw this. I don’t really care what they are doing. If they are doing great, awesome; if they are not doing great, whatever. I’m just going to focus on myself and do the best that I can.
“As cliché as that sounds in our sport, it is the literal truth. So that is where my head space was at basically.”
With that in mind, Nguyen returned to a pair of golden oldies, so to speak, that have served him well in the past: “That’s Life,” by Frank Sinatra, the short program that helped him win a Canadian title in 2019, and The Beatles-themed long program that he skated so brilliantly at Skate Canada International later that year.
“The programs that I had, the “White Legend” and the Josh Groban piece (“Mi Mancherai”) … they are two very beautiful pieces of music. Nobody can deny that,” he said. “But clearly each time I went out, the scores got lower and lower. I obviously wasn’t putting in as much effort as I was with my previous programs.
“After Challenge is when it was crystal clear to me that I can’t perform these programs at all because it looks like I hate skating. I’m also not even looking at the judges and the audience. When I look back at the season, I had not once made a personal connection to the judges or the audience. This was more of a last ditch attempt for me to show everybody that I still love to skate.”
This is how Nguyen wants to leave the sport and he hopes audiences will feel the same while watching his final performances.
“I am nowhere near Yuzuru (Hanyu) or Nathan (Chen) or Patrick (Chan) or those kinds of people, but I would like to make an impact on the sport by having people say that I somewhat entertained them,” he said. “The majority of my programs are entertaining, I would hope, so that is kind of why I decided to go back to the two old programs.”
Nguyen also speaks with enthusiasm about what will come next for him after he writes his final chapter in the sport. He recently became a power skating coach for some young hockey players in Toronto, which is something he is already passionate about. He was inspired by the work of Barbara Underhill, the 1984 World pairs champion, who spent many years as a power skating instructor for the NHL’s Toronto Maple Leafs.
“Just the way my personality and the kids’ energy is when I work with them … I think we create some amazing magic even though we are just skating,” Nguyen explained. “I plan to continue investing in that when I am done, and hopefully, turn it into a business. This market is so new and I just want to capitalize on it, and basically share my experience and my perspective on skating with the hockey world.”
He is also working toward obtaining his real estate license and has been studying both the residential and commercial aspects of that business. Nguyen got his own introduction to that world when he purchased a condo in downtown Toronto in January 2021.
At some point, he would like to move back to Vancouver, where he grew up before relocating to Toronto at age 14 to train with Brian Orser at the Cricket Club.
A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, both calm and turbulent, but if he has his way, Nguyen will be smiling as he takes his final bow. “I fought through it all and I am still fighting. However long I have in this sport, I am just going to keep pushing as hard as I can and show people that I love to skate.”
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