Dick Button
Nathan Chen
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Dick Button leads 3 of 5 categories. Our all-time ranking places Dick Button at #5 and Nathan Chen at #9.
The case for Dick Button
The man who turned figure skating from a drawing exercise into an athletic event. Button won two Olympic titles, at St. Moritz 1948 and Oslo 1952, five consecutive world championships from 1948 to 1952, seven straight United States titles, and the 1948 European Championship, the only non-European ever to win it before the ISU closed the event to outsiders. He landed the first double Axel in competition at the 1948 Olympics and the first triple jump of any kind, a triple loop, at Oslo in 1952, and invented the flying camel spin still known in some rinks as the Button camel. He retired at 22, took a Harvard law degree, and then spent nearly five decades as American television's voice of the sport, winning an Emmy and shaping how tens of millions of casual viewers understood what they were watching. No skater has combined technical invention, competitive dominance and long-term influence over the audience quite so completely.
The case for Nathan Chen
The skater who solved the quadruple era arithmetically. Chen won Olympic gold at Beijing 2022 with a world-record short program of 113.97, took three world titles in 2018, 2019 and 2021, six consecutive United States championships from 2017, and three straight Grand Prix Finals. He did not lose a completed competition between the 2018 World Championships and his Olympic title, a four-year run through the deepest men's field ever assembled. His signature was volume and repeatability rather than a single trick: after a disastrous short program at Pyeongchang 2018 he answered with a free skate carrying six quadruple attempts, the most technically loaded program skated to that point, and climbed from seventeenth to fifth. His 335.30 at the 2019 Grand Prix Final in Turin, built on 110.38 and a free skate of 224.92, set the world-record total under the ISU Judging System. He did much of it while enrolled at Yale, commuting between New Haven and California to train.