Milan
When it unravels like that, the whole spectacle starts to feel pretty cruel. All that crackling pressure on one athlete, the hushed ooooooohhs from the rafters, all of it. Even safely upstairs in the crowd, you want to hide under a table.
It’s still a sporting event——it’s the Olympics, nothing’s bigger—but it no longer feels athletic, thrilling or anywhere close to fun. The anticipation and exuberance that bounced around in the arena moments ago gets sucked out of the concrete and cold dread rushes in. The crowd goes numb, near silent. You can almost hear the blades on the ice, glumly slashing through the final motions of a night expected to end so differently.
Ilia Malinin was supposed to win the gold medal in men’s figure skating Friday in Milan. He was supposed to do this because we had all been told he was supposed to do this, not just by the television shows, newspaper stories, video forensics and years of dominating results, but also by Malinin himself. The crowd expected him to win, his opponents expected him to win, and Malinin did, too. If you didn’t believe that, all you needed to do was look at the T-shirt he was wearing backstage.
QUAD GOD, it read, in gold. That is Malinin’s nickname, and though it was earned via his charismatic and unprecedented gift for throwing himself in the air for four revolutions, it is not the sort of moniker you embrace if you’re feeling shy about your chances.
One wonders if Malinin will mull a rebrand after an agonizing long program in which, installed the final, climactic slot, with a clear route to victory, the presumed winner honed in Northern Virginia, instead fell twice, cut off jumps, lost his momentum and his mojo, and tumbled to an unimaginable eighth place.
A stunner, to say the least, and another reminder that sports aren’t just unpredictable, but ruthless. Ready for his enshrinement, Malinin left the ice no longer a god, but utterly human.
In the crush of media afterward I asked Malinin what he was thinking, if he’d had any time to process it. It’s a bit of a ridiculous query in a chaotic environment—who wouldn’t want to get out of there as fast as possible and climb under a pile of blankets—but Malinin was composed, almost clinical.
“Honestly, I still haven’t been able to process what has happened,” he said. “Going into this competition, I felt really good. This whole day was going really solid, and I just thought that all I needed to do was go out there and trust the process that I’ve always been doing with every competition.”
“But of course, it’s not like any other competition,” he continued. “It’s the Olympics, and I think people only realize the pressure and the nerves that actually happen from the inside. It was really just something that overwhelmed me and I just felt like I had no control.”
This is the part where I remind you Ilia Malinin is 21 years old, and was competing in his first Winter Games. He may have been the sport’s defending back-to-back world champion, a phenom who had not finished anywhere other than first place since 2023—he’d not finished entirely off the podium since 2022—but the exponential fuss of the Olympics was foreign to him. He’d wobbled a bit in the team skate event earlier in the Games, and though he’d bounced back to help Team USA win a gold, and charged through his solo short program a few days later, he’d struggled to swell into his full, confident Quad God self.
Why?
“Honestly, I can’t understand what it was,” he said.
Was it the ice? Someone asked. No, Malinin refused to complain about that. Everyone had to skate on that ice, he said.
It was probably just nerves, which he said began as his long program started, and quickly turned “overwhelming.”
“I just felt like all the just traumatic moments of my life really just started flooding my head,” he said. “There’s just so many negative thoughts that just flooded into there and I just did not handle it.”
It was stark candor from an athlete who had every right to be undone. Malinin wasn’t shrinking from the disastrousness which had happened. Earlier, he’d summed up his performance in three words: “I blew it.”
This wasn’t on the menu. For weeks the planet had been given a crash course in all things Ilia—his back story; his Olympic skater parents Roman and Tatiana; his precocious rise from the D.C. suburbs to the undisputed pinnacle of his sport. Most of all, we’d been shown the video evidence of what made Malinin so great—those quad leaps, which he did better than anyone, and that quad axel, which he was the only skater to do, period.
He was a young Olympian breaking through, on the cusp of wild fame. A week ago you may have had no idea who he was, this blonde rocket in sequins who looked like he belonged on a Frozen lunchbox. But you knew now, and you were promised both success and awe. Malinin wasn’t merely dominating figure skating. He was breaking it.
Instead, on the biggest night of his young career, before an audience eager to see things it had never seen, and validate him as skating’s best ever, Malinin fell, then fell apart. Now he has to wait forever for revenge.
Scarcity is what makes the Olympics what they are—the fact that they happen once every four years. This is also what makes them so pressurized and painful when they go awry. Other sports offer a faster reset. Jannik Sinner misses match points to Carlos Alcaraz at the French Open and only needs to wait a few weeks to take his revenge at Wimbledon. Alcaraz turns around and thumps Sinner at the U.S. Open. Drake Maye may be sore from a Super Bowl loss, but spring practice will be here before he knows it.
Olympic scars linger far longer. Malinin remains a great figure skater, one who presumably will win more titles and add to his story. Now this brutal evening in Milan becomes part of that story, and it is up to him where he takes it. Is it only anguish—or can it be motivation?
Ilia Malinin is a young man who had a very tough night and is young enough to be brilliant again. Someone please tell the Quad God: The world loves a comeback even more than a quadruple axel.
Write to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com
