For nearly two years, Ilia Malinin has made men’s figure skating feel predictable in the most spectacular of ways. On Friday night on the southern outskirts of Milan, the Olympic Games reminded the sport, and perhaps Malinin himself, that predictability is never guaranteed on its biggest stage.
The overwhelming favorite entering the free skate, the 21-year-old American instead saw the Olympic title slip away to Kazakhstan’s Mikhail Shaidorov after an error-strewn performance that will go down among the biggest shocks in figure skating history.
Shaidorov’s season-best total of 291.58 vaulted him from fifth after the short program as one favored contender after another faltered. Japan’s Yuma Kagiyama (280.06) and Shun Sato (274.90) took silver and bronze respectively on a night where even the sport’s most reliable jump technicians struggled to hold their programs together.
Malinin entered the final segment with a lead of just over five points, a margin that under normal circumstances would have allowed him to skate conservatively and still win. It wasn’t to be.
Malinin was the last of the 24 skaters to take to the ice, with the Olympic title seemingly within reach after his closest rivals faltered. He opened with a quad flip and quad lutz, but the mistakes quickly piled up. The planned quad axel was reduced to a single and later he fell on another quad lutz. He also doubled jumps he would normally complete with more rotations, though he salvaged points with a quad toe loop combination.
He finished with 156.33 in the free skate and 264.49 overall, left shockingly off the podium in a distant eighth place.
The invincibility that has defined Malinin’s competitive aura over the past two seasons had been shattered.
“I blew it,” Malinin said afterward. “That’s honestly the first thing that came to my mind. There’s no way that just happened. I was preparing the whole season and was so confident in my program, so confident with everything. I have no words really.”
The result ended an unbeaten streak of more than two years spanning 14 competitions, including two world titles and three consecutive Grand Prix final victories. Entering the Milano Cortina Games, Malinin had redefined the technical boundaries of the sport, becoming the only skater in history to land the quadruple axel in competition and building programs around record-level quad difficulty.
Yet even before Friday, his Olympic experience had shown flashes of vulnerability. He was beaten by Kagiyama in the team event short program and later admitted the pressure of competing on Olympic ice had initially overwhelmed him. While he rebounded to help the United States secure team gold, his performances lacked the usual sense of technical inevitability.
By Tuesday’s individual short program, that swagger appeared restored. Malinin took a five-point lead that felt insurmountable given his planned seven-quad free skate layout – the most difficult program ever attempted at the Olympics. At a practice at the US team’s alternate base in Bergamo hours before the final, he reportedly did not fall once. Then came a performance that will leave scars for years to come.
“Definitely not a pleasant feeling,” Malinin said. “Training up all these years, going up to it, it honestly went by so fast. I didn’t have time to process what to do or anything. It all happens so fast.”
By the end Malinin was skating largely for pride rather than placement. After he struck his final pose, he was visibly distraught.
“The pressure of the Olympics really gets you,” Malinin said. “People say that there’s an Olympic curse, that the Olympic gold medal favorite is always going to skate bad at the Olympics. So that’s what happens.
“The pressure is unreal. It’s really not easy, but I’m still proud of being able to get to the finish.”
For the 21-year-old Shaidorov, the moment marked a career breakthrough and a milestone for Kazakhstan. His clean, composed free skate – built on five quads and efficient execution – proved exactly the type of performance that wins Olympic titles when favorites unravel. He looked as surprised as anyone when the final scores flashed and his placement was official.
He became the first Kazakh Olympic figure skating champion, delivering his country’s first gold medal at these Games and its first gold in any Winter Olympic sport since Lillehammer 1994.
Kagiyama’s silver marked his second consecutive Olympic runner-up finish, reinforcing his reputation as one of the sport’s most reliable championship performers. Sato’s bronze completed a strong night for Japan, whose technical depth again showed on the sport’s biggest stage.
Inside the arena, the atmosphere shifted from anticipation to disbelief as the standings solidified. What had seemed to be a coronation for Malinin instead became a reminder of the Olympic reality: that even generational dominance can dissolve in seven minutes of skating.
For Malinin, the defeat is unlikely to change the broader trajectory of his career. At 21, he remains the sport’s most technically gifted skater and the architect of its current technical revolution. But on this night, Olympic history belonged to someone else. And for the first time in years, men’s figure skating suddenly feels open again.
