COVID, near Year 3, still stinks for everyone — but spare an extra thought for our Olympians.

Bad luck means that they must take their once-in-a-lifetime chance in authoritarian China in the middle of a global pandemic, terrified that they’ll test positive and be finished competing — and locked up in quarantine isolation, too.

Yet they’re still managing to power through, especially figure skater Nathan Chen, these games’ breakout star and the perfect athlete for our head-fake times. 

Most elite athletes are not like us: It’s hard to relate to Tom Brady and his supermodel wife or to Tiger Woods and his — well, never mind.

But Olympians are different. These are amateur, not professional, sports; most competitors never get paid much for their work.

Unless you do become tops in your field and stay there for a while, being intent on becoming the fastest skier or most precise curler in the world is more like having a strange, expensive all-consuming hobby than being, say, a pro baseball or football player.

In pro ball, if you are the world’s next star pitcher or halfback, COVID is a setback, sure. But it’s not your whole career; you’ve got time to make it up. 

Not so if you participate in a sport, such as figure skating, whose moment on the world stage comes just once every four years.

If you are in the mix, you can’t miss one Olympics. You can be too young and inexperienced to perform flawlessly for gold during one Olympiad, and then be too old and decrepit to do so eight years later.

If this is your year, well, it’s already been a bad break. Think of Vincent Zhou, the 21-year-old Californian skating star who helped bring his team to silver last week but then had to withdraw from the individual male competition because he tested positive for COVID.

“I have been doing everything in my power to stay free of COVID since the start of the pandemic,” Zhou said from his isolation room in China, curtains tightly drawn, noting that “the loneliness I felt . . . has been crushing.” 

Nathan Chen, the new record-beating gold medalist, had to compete in this same environment: constant isolation, fear of getting COVID and having all that work be for nothing. This Olympics was the 22-year-old Chen’s second, and likely last, chance; he competed in South Korea four years ago and did poorly. 

And you could see the anxiety throughout the short program, the first of the two-part skate. Chen, a Salt Lake City native who trains in California (and goes to Yale in Connecticut in his free time), was technically perfect in his quadruple jumps, but he looked so nervous that you almost felt sorry for him. 

Chen’s long-program skate Thursday, though, was the perfect 4½-minute encapsulation of breaking free from COVID anxiety.

For the first two minutes, Chen once again looked like a terrified hostage of fortune: a world-class skater, sure, but grimly, fearfully skating for his life. A few seconds after the two-minute mark, though, it’s like a different person has taken over. After he hits his jumps, Chen makes his best move yet and smiles.

The rest of the skate is pure unselfconscious exuberance.

Most of us, of course, are not world-class skaters or world-class anything — but we have faced the same relentless anxiety and fear over the past two years. Will we get long COVID? Will we lose our jobs? Will our family members and friends get sick? Is going to the movies a life-or-death decision?

So Chen’s second half is a lesson: Relax and have fun! If we have made it this far, we are doing well. We are all the winners but thinking of those who weren’t as lucky. 

In receiving his gold medal Thursday, Chen mouthed a silent “Wow.” Then, the near-perfect skater had to make a move that all of us have made over the past two years: He, along with the silver and bronze medalists (both from Japan), had to fumble in his pocket for his mask. 

It’s a weird world — but remember to say “Wow” before they make you put on your mask.

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.