MILAN — Something was wrong from the very start. Something about Ilia Malinin’s free skate Friday seemed tentative, uncertain, so very unlike the “Quad God.” This was his gold-medal moment, and it was slipping away from him.
He landed his first element, a quad flip, but it had the feel of an unexpected success, like a half-court heave that went through the net, rather than the start of a triumphal procession. And then he skated toward his planned quad axel, a move literally only he can land, a move that could have put him on a direct path to the top of the podium.
Advertisement
He flinched … and was lost.
In one of the most stunning collapses in Olympic figure skating history, Malinin plummeted from a near-certain gold medal all the way to eighth place. Kazakhstan’s Mikhail Shaidorov won gold, while Japan’s Yuma Kagiyama took silver and Japan’s Shun Sato claimed the bronze medal. Malinin finished with a score of 264.49, well behind Shaidorov’s 291.58, Kagiyama’s 280.06 and Sato’s 274.90.
No one saw this coming — not Malinin, not skating fans, and not the betting markets, which had Malinin as an overwhelming -10000 favorite to win.
As Malinin spoke after his skate, televisions around the Olympic mixed zone under the arena’s stands showed the night’s three medalists ascending the podium. Malinin didn’t seem to look in their direction, though as the national anthem of Kazakhstan played out in the arena, he knew exactly what was going on.
USA’s Ilia Malinin went from gold medal favorite in the men’s individual competition to failing to medal Friday at the Milan Cortina Olympics.
(Qian Jun/MB Media via Getty Images)
Malinin’s free skate routine begins, oddly enough, with his own recorded voice. “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing,” his voice echoes in the silent arena as he stands at center ice, preparing to begin.
Advertisement
On a good night, his lines feel like a battle cry. On Friday night, they felt almost forlorn, a desperate attempt to rally himself in front of the entire world.
“Honestly, before getting into my starting pose, I just felt all of those experienced memories, thoughts really just rush in,” Malinin said. “It just felt so overwhelming. Honestly, I didn’t really know how to handle it at that moment.”
The audience at the Assago Ice Skating Arena could feel it all falling apart as element after element crumbled. The quad loop Malinin had listed in his planned program became a double loop in reality. The triple flip never materialized. The quad salchow became a double salchow that ended with Malinin falling to the ice. And by then, it was all over but the cold, merciless math.
“I blew it,” Malinin told NBC after his skate. “That’s honestly the first thing that came into my mind — there’s no way that just happened. I was preparing the whole season. I felt so confident with my program. To go out and have that happen … there’s no words, honestly.”
Advertisement
This is the brutal cruelty of the Olympics, of figure skating. You devote your entire life to this merciless, fickle sport; you give up every shred of a normal life, from school to friends to weekends to holidays; you devote it all to the pursuit of perfection. And in the coldest twist of all, the closer you get to the pinnacle, the more you start to believe that perfection is possible … right up until your dreams vanish in mere minutes. The higher you rise, the further you have to fall.
Malinin is 21 years old, and in the minutes after his skate, he looked both much younger than that, and much more world-weary and broken, too. He faced multiple media outlets, dozens of lenses and microphones and questioners all seeking to understand how this could have happened. How could a skater who’s reigned over the sport — two straight world championships, four straight national championships, no loss anywhere on Earth since November 2023 — fall apart so suddenly, so thoroughly?
Advertisement
The words were there, but like his routine earlier, Malinin looked uncomfortable speaking them. He committed the athlete’s unpardonable sin, confessing to weakness. But it seemed the right thing to do in the moment. What else could he do?
“I just thought that all I needed to do is go out there and trust the process that I’ve always been doing with every competition,” Malinin said. “But of course, it’s not like any other competition. It’s the Olympics, and I think people only realize the pressure, and the nerves that actually happened, from the inside. So it was really just something that overwhelmed me, and I just felt like I had no control.”
He threaded his way into an excuse — “Maybe the ice was also not the best condition for what I would like to have” — but quickly found his way right back out again. Everyone skates on the same ice, after all, and if he’d merely matched the scores of any of the three skaters who went right before him, he would have medaled.
After Malinin vanished behind closed doors, and as the fans left the arena, one last cruel joke awaited. On the overhead speaker system — the one that had carried Malinin’s own voice just a few minutes before — a surely well-meaning DJ cued up Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida,” and, for Malinin, its sadly on-point lyrics.
Advertisement
I used to rule the world … One minute, I held the key / Next the walls were closed on me …
It’s a long time until the 2030 Olympics in Chamonix, France. If Malinin makes it there, at least he’ll know what to expect.
Leave a Reply