Tiffany Chin’s career was as short as it was spectacular.
Over a seven-year stretch that ended before she was even an adult, Chin was one of the most decorated figure skaters in the world, winning a world junior title, a U.S. championship and two Skate America crowns while finishing fourth in her only trip to the Olympics.
Nearly four decades later it’s not so much the victories or the medals she cherishes, but rather the impact it made on others.
“I am always flattered and taken aback when someone tells me ‘I watched you. You inspired me,’” Chin said. “I’m tickled that I could do something like that for someone.”
She did more than simply inspire the next two generations of American skaters; she arguably transformed them. Before Chin, no Chinese American or Asian American had ever won a senior national title or skated in the Olympics. She accomplished both before her 17th birthday, paving the way for those who followed, among them Kristi Yamaguchi, Nathan Chen, Michelle Kwan, Karen Chen and Alysa Liu.
“I just felt really lucky to have gotten there first because look at all these amazing champions we have now,” said Chin, who was landing the most demanding triple jump, a triple axel, in practice before anyone had done one in competition.
At 58, Chin spends her ice time coaching, working children as young as 3 up to two-time Olympian Kailani Craine of Australia.
Her life has included far more than skating, though, and every one of her students benefit from the hard-won wisdom she learned along the way.
“In my career there are some big ups and there’s some really low lows,” Chin said between lessons at the Toyota Performance Center in El Segundo. “Sometimes those lows are so devastating that you almost don’t want to look back. It’s a black point in your life.
“Now this experience has allowed me to embrace all of it. And that’s a wonderful thing because you have to embrace all of it to move forward.”
Chin began skating at age 8 after her mother, Marjorie, bought her a pair of skates at a garage sale. Within a year she was already doing a camel spin and as she got better, her mother began setting her up with a succession of coaches. She started with Wanda Gunter and Janet Champion in San Diego, who Marjorie replaced with Frank Carroll in L.A. County. That required the two to drive up the 405 for lessons.
Carroll guided Chin to the junior world title at 13 before Marjorie sacked him, too, for John Nicks, who had trained the likes of Peggy Fleming, Tai Babilonia, Randy Gardner, and later, Yamaguchi and Sasha Cohen.
“I’ve always known she loves me. Present tense,” Chin said of her mother, with whom she remains close. “You’ve got to stand by the people that love you.”
Nicks eventually lost his job too, but after a year with Don Laws, the Chins — mother and daughter were always a team — returned to Nicks, then Carroll again. Injuries were as frequent a part of Chin’s career as coaching changes and when it appeared unlikely she would make the U.S. team for the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary, she retired from competition rather than skate in pain and signed a seven-figure contract with an ice show.
She was just 20 and was retiring at an age when many of her friends were still in school.
“I definitely wasn’t doing as well as I wanted to going into that last Olympics,” she said. “So I didn’t have the heart to go on. It’s so hard on the body and it’s so much time.
“In other sports there’s a lot more of an offseason. This is pretty much on all the time.”
If her career was extraordinary, in retirement she became ordinary, returning to school and graduating from UCLA with an English degree. She got married, gave birth to a son, then got divorced.
At one point she considered becoming a lawyer, maybe working in contractual law. But she eventually returned to the ice as a coach.
“It’s funny because I never saw myself as a coach while I was skating,” she said. “I see it as sharing something I love with other people that love it too. Then that becomes very easy.”
Her retirement hasn’t been completely typical because in addition to coaching an Olympian, she was inducted into the U.S. Figure Skating Hall of Fame in 2022, and before that she was honored by the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California. Then there’s the whole thing about blazing the trail for inclusion that changed the face of American figure skating forever.
“It was such a treasured memory,” she says of her skating career. “And it was such a building block for so many other things in my life.”
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