Having basically exhausted the English language’s supply of superlatives to describe Nathan Chen’s skating over the past three seasons, I woke up Sunday morning looking for other ways to find context for what seemed his almost certain fifth straight U.S. title.

Without more than a gut feeling, which was intensified by his commanding execution Saturday of the most technically difficult short program he had done since 2018, I had a sense that Chen has had a remarkable success rate for several years in programs packed with the toughest array of jumps anyone ever has tried in the sport.

So, with the help of the data mining genius behind the invaluable web site skatingscores.com (who prefers anonymity), I set off to dredge through old scoring protocols to see whether statistical evidence supported my intuition about how consistently good Chen’s jumping has been during an unbeaten streak in 12 individual live competitions that began with the 2018 World Championships.

Sometimes things are hidden in plain sight.

And sometimes you find them deep in a publicly available document.

And sometimes they come to your attention because the keen eye of a colleague points them out, as, in this case, David Owen did for a recent blog on insidethegames.biz.

And the case in question is just another example of how International Olympic Committee members and those non-members who serve on IOC commissions live off the fat of the land.

And all these people are volunteers, ostensibly inclined to get involved with what is pretentiously called the Olympic Movement (capital “M” in IOC documents) out of an altruistic desire to help athletes in Olympic sports.

Altruism, it turns out, has its financial rewards, shared by an ever-growing number of people, as Owen detailed.

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By the numbers, Nathan Chen’s jumps add up to a new dimension of skating

Adding more seats to its gravy train costs the IOC way more than it seems

Globetrotting by Philip Hersh

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