Yuzuru Hanyu, Nathan Chen’s rival, appears to fall short of a comeback.

Yuzuru Hanyu of Japan entered the Beijing Olympics as the two-time defending gold medalist and Nathan Chen’s chief rival.

Now Hanyu’s incredible reign at the Olympics is over, after a costly mistake in his short program on Tuesday. His free skate score today, 188.06, moved him into first place at the moment but it almost certainly won’t be enough to win him a third gold. If he had won, it would have been the first time in nearly 100 years that a man won three men’s singles golds in a row.

He tried a quadruple axel, a jump that has never been landed in competition, but fell. Then he fell again, on his next attempted quad.

He took deep, long bows to every corner of the arena and bowed again after stepping off the ice. I think he even grabbed some ice and put it up to his forehead. (Hard to see from where I’m sitting in the stands.)

In his short program Tuesday morning, he shockingly pulled out of his first planned jump, a quad salchow, rotating just once instead of four times, and scoring zero points for the maneuver. So what happened? His skate got caught on a groove in the ice, he said on Japanese television afterward. He jumped with the right form and the right timing, he said, but at that moment, “I was in the hole. It was the hole from the toe jump. So I couldn’t help it.”

Hanyu compared the jump to one at the 2019 world championships, where he under rotated on a quad salchow but still managed to finish second to Nathan Chen.

Hanyu injured his ankle in November, but he said that his preparation for the Olympics had gone well.